Although society as a whole may not endorse remarriage with children as "the way things should be," it is anything but uncommon. Approximately half of all marriages in the United States each year are remarriages for one or both partners, and 65 percent of those remarrying have children from a previous relationship. It's not numbers alone that make such unions business as usual, however. Remarriage with children also has deep historical roots in the United States. Far from a departure from the norm, remarriage with children has been common throughout American history.
Remarriage rates have actually changed very little in the past three centuries. A 1689 census for Plymouth Township, Massachusetts Bay Colony, noted that among the population of adults ages fifty and over, 40 percent of the men and more than one-quarter of the women had remarried at least once. This trend continued for the following two centuries. Psychotherapist and marriage researcher Susan Gamache, Ph.D., estimates that in 1850, half of all American children would have had a stepmother. These remarriages were virtually always formed after the death of a spouse. Owing to the production-centered nature of households throughout our early history, during which husbands' and wives' economic roles were utterly interdependent, these remarriages with children were essential to the continued well-being of families and entire communities.
In contrast, today 90 percent of those who remarry do so after a divorce, changing both the symbolic import and the lived experience of remarriage with children in fundamental ways. In contemporary remarriage, there is almost always an ex-spouse, for example, a fact that is likely to influence the children's behavior and greatly affect the outcome of the stepchild-stepparent relationship. In addition, a remarriage with children today is more likely to be viewed as optional, a choice—in some cases even a rupture of the moral contract if one spouse leaves the other for another man or woman—rather than an economic and emotional necessity for the good of the children and the larger community. To complicate matters even further, stepfamilies and remarried couples today confront what Johns Hopkins University sociologist and history of marriage expert Andrew Cherlin, Ph.D., calls a "lack of institutionalization"—the absence of clear norms, expectations, and rules about how to be a stepfamily or a remarried couple with children. This means dealing with ambiguity and biases great and small—everything from not being allowed to make decisions about a stepchild's medical care in an emergency to wondering how to handle parent-teacher conferences, from not knowing what a stepchild should call us to many people's unconscious and conscious assumptions that remarriages and stepfamilies are somehow deficient in comparison to first ones. In the absence of the broad goodwill and social support that remarriage met with in previous centuries—in the presence, as a matter of fact, of biases in public policy, legal status, and ideology that amount to stigmatization—a woman's marriage to a man with children is subject to extraordinary outside pressures. More than any other kind of marriage, it requires prioritizing, tending, and that most unreliable yet essential salve—true love.
The divorce rate for remarriages with children was, until recently, thought to be about 60 percent, which is 17 percent higher than the overall divorce rate. Now, however, the eminent divorce researcher and clinical psychologist E. Mavis Hetherington suggests that the divorce rate may be as high as 65 percent for remarriages in which one partner has children from a previous union (a "simple" stepfamily), and a sobering 70 percent when both partners bring their own children to the picture (a "complex" stepfamily). The divorce rate for remarriages with children is 50 percent higher than that for remarriages with no children, and remarried couples rate children as the number one source of stress and tension in their marriages. Indeed, a mere 5 percent of Hetherington's 1,400 study participants reported that they considered their stepchildren an asset to their marriage. Simply put, the single greatest threat to a remarriage is the presence of children of any age from a prior union.
Why might this be? What accounts for the extraordinary pressure his kids exert on your partnership? As researchers Kay Pasley and Marilyn Ihinger-Tallman have noted, although children typically have no say in their parents' decision to remarry and form a new family, they do have incredible power to break it up. As we have seen, stepchildren can be a source of nearly constant conflict, especially early in the marriage, as the couple deals with their hostility toward Stepmom and issues such as discipline and what their expectations of his kids will be. As stepfamily expert and family therapist Patricia Papernow explains, the issue with his children is virtually structural: "The parent feels attached to, pulled by, nourished by, and connected to the same child that the stepparent [likely] feels rejected by, ignored by, jealous of, competitive with, and exhausted by." In addition, as discussed in chapters 3, 4, and 5, stepmothers are overwhelmingly likely to find themselves in partnerships with men who are permissive parents. In reaction, the stepmother may call for structure, setting the stage for the couple to fight about his kids. Papernow describes this common dynamic as "being polarized by parenting his kids."
As if this polarization over parenting isn't enough, other factors can make remarriage with children particularly challenging. First, these couples are confronted with a number of definitional tasks and burdens that other couples are not—there is simply so much to do. Each couple must find a stepmother role that everyone—husband, wife, and stepchildren—can accept, which often takes months or even years of painful, divisive trial and error. Second, if the woman brings children to the union as well, there is the task of merging kids from different households and family cultures—not to mention the draining work of putting out all the fires that are bound to erupt during the process. Third, the presence of an ex-spouse who may be uncooperative further complicates the picture. Even if the ex is cooperative, all of the adults still need to coordinate schedules—pickups and drop-offs, doctor's appointments, music lessons, sporting events, and the like—and deal with all the emotions that transitions between households are likely to stir up for children and adults alike. And because stepchildren are the links between the two households, they can create friction by making comparisons, passing along unkind messages, and even spying. With older children, the remarried couple must navigate fraught holidays, visits, and life events such as graduations, weddings, and births, as well as relationships with step-in-laws. All these logistics are likely to have strong emotional components. Lois Braverman, head of Manhattan's Ackerman Institute for the Family, told me, "Just schedule-wise, a remarried couple with kids involves many more people's involvement and approval. Day-to-day life can be an exhausting negotiation. This is something that is unique to stepfamilies, something you don't see in a first marriage."
It is no wonder, given all these daunting tasks, that the remarried couple often forgets to pay attention to the marriage. As Ella, the Manhattan mom of three young kids and stepmom of two, told me, "It feels like a zero-sum game sometimes, trying to find time for just my husband and me." Somehow, the husband and wife have to establish and maintain a close couple relationship, despite the presence of kids who are likely to feel unenthusiastic and even antagonistic toward the union and their stepmother, often into adulthood.
With the cards stacked against it, your marriage needs more than mere tending. Battered by issues and dynamics not found in a first union, yours will not survive unless it is given special priority by both you and your husband. This will not likely present a problem if your husband is in his late fifties or older. Such men tend to adhere to the cultural script of their generation, leaving "kin-keeping behaviors," such as close relationships with both young children and adult children, to their wives and focusing their attention on their careers and their spouses. The upside of this tendency for stepmothers is that they are unlikely to struggle with the feeling that they come second. The downside is that adult stepchildren tend to hold their stepmothers responsible for their fathers' behavior, which they interpret as a choice. Even when they sense that their fathers are basically blindly following their social programming, several adult stepchildren I spoke to still blamed Stepmom for it. "He just lets her call all the shots," one stepdaughter said.
As we saw in chapter 5, today's increasingly involved dads have their own difficulties when it comes to balancing remarriage and fatherhood. Unlike men from previous generations, who simply left the child rearing to the women or moved on after a divorce, happy with a hands-off, every-other-weekend arrangement, "many of today's divorced and remarried fathers are trying to work with the notion of 'two firsts,'" Francesca Adler-Baeder, coordinator of the National Stepfamily Resource Center, told me. This point was really brought home to me when I interviewed a man with children who had divorced and remarried. Asked to rate certain statements from 1 to 10, with 1 being "not at all true" and 10 being "very true," he gave both "My marriage comes first" and "My kids come first" a 10. Like him, most men today feel more of an obligation to put both their kids from a previous marriage and their wives at the top of the list, and too often this results in an emotionally exhausting, lose-lose proposition. More than one divorced and remarried man with kids I interviewed said something to this effect: "For the first few years, I felt that everyone—my wife, my kids, my ex-wife—was mad at me all the time." Patricia Papernow told me that one of her patients lamented, "I'm the meat that everybody wants a slice of. Nobody sees I'm bleeding."
The belief that everyone in the family must have "equal standing" and get the man's "equal attention" is confusing and stressful for everyone, regardless of whether they all live together, the kids are there only on weekends, or the kids are adults. In a successful and satisfying first marriage, the partnership is the foundation of the entire family system. Without it, there is no family. Things are different in a remarriage. Especially in the first five to seven years of a remarriage, psychologist James Bray and others have found, the relationship between father and child—reaching far back in time, soldered with that intense intimacy a divorced parent can achieve with a child when they spend exclusive quality time together—is likely to be stronger than the relationship between husband and wife. And so from the outset, the hierarchy of the stepfamily system is unclear. This creates confusion ("Do I have to be nice to her?" "Is she here to stay?" "What will Dad do if I just ignore her or if I'm rude to her?" "Who is my husband going to side with, his kids or me?"), which in turn leads to power struggles. Children who have become very tight with Dad during his single period might actually believe that they can "veto" Stepmother or treat her as an intruder. This perception becomes more entrenched the longer Dad hesitates to convey to them the primacy of his marriage, as if to spare their feelings and shield them from the fact that they're no longer the only ones in his life. Far from protecting them, however, he is putting his wife and marriage in the line of fire, while inflating his kids' sense of power in the home and the world.
Rebecca, age forty-five, was living this problem when we spoke. She told me, with a shake of her head, that a few nights before, she had felt pressured by her husband to cancel a long-standing "couples night out" with old friends who were in town for just a few days. Her husband's young adult daughter—with whom he had been arguing—had called that afternoon saying she wanted to come by to talk. "When his daughter decides she wants to show up, we're supposed to drop everything," Rebecca remarked dryly. "That's pretty hard to take. We're supposed to cancel on our dear friends we almost never see so [he] can have a fight with [his] daughter or make up with her? It can't wait until the next day? But when I said I thought it was silly to cancel, he said, 'Don't you want me to have a relationship with my daughter?'" Rebecca sighed. "Of course I want him to have a relationship with his daughter. I just don't think our lives should screech to a halt when she feels like showing up."
Given such potential problems, stepfamily experts such as Emily and John Visher and James Bray advise that the partnership between adults must be strong and primary and that the couple must be a unified team in a stepfamily more than in any other kind of family. Summarizing the research, his years of experience as a psychologist and family therapist, and his position on the matter, Bray states, "Marital satisfaction almost always determines stepfamily stability. If satisfaction is high, tolerance for the normal tumult and conflict of stepfamily life is correspondingly high. If marital satisfaction is low, however, tolerance for conflict is so low that often the stepfamily dissolves in divorce." Given the incredible vulnerability of the couple relationship in stepfamilies, giving priority to this relationship increases the chances of keeping the stepfamily together. Translation: putting the marriage first is good for everyone.
What does putting your marriage first mean in practical terms? No one is suggesting shutting his children out or ignoring them when they're around. But to succeed, you and your partner must let the kids know that your relationship is airtight, rock solid, and important to you both. You can demonstrate this in small, simple ways, such as holding hands when his kids are in the room (if that's something you would normally do) or telling them about a regular couple ritual—"We make hash browns every Sunday morning because we love them"—and inviting them to join in. Dr. Andrew Gotzis, a New York City therapist, suggests that it might help to have something else going on when his kids show up—a chore such as planting the garden or dinner with adults your stepkids know or would enjoy meeting—rather than providing a big-deal red-carpet welcome every time they show up. Little things like this will give his kids the sense that you have a daily life together, whether they are there or not. That in turn will help make it clear that your relationship is primary, that the kids are not in control of the marriage or the household, and that Dad and Stepmom are in charge and in love. Knowing the order of things and where they stand in it, experts agree, is enormously reassuring for children. By contrast, constantly custom-designing weekends for his kids sends the message that you feel you should turn your life upside down for them. This puts a lot of pressure on you and on the kids, too.
Above all, putting your marriage first means thinking of yourself and your partner as a team. This might not be easy. As Patricia Papernow has written, the course of development in a remarriage with children "involves wresting the sanctuary for nourishment and the seat of joint decision-making away from the parent/child relationship and establishing it firmly in the couple relationship." In most cases, stepchildren are likely to resent this realignment. In practical terms, a mantra such as "We're the team" can be helpful, especially when his kids live with you and conflicts about discipline and manners arise daily. Given that children are geniuses when it comes to sensing and exploiting marital discord, husband and wife must strive to present a united front, backing each other up in front of the kids no matter what. If you turn off the TV while Susie is watching because she hasn't loaded the dishwasher yet as promised, for example, and your husband disagrees with what you've done, it's best for him to zip it until the two of you are alone. Nothing empowers, confuses, or upsets children more than feeling that they—and not the adults—are in control. And nothing makes a stepmother feel more resentful, discouraged, or "degraded," as stepmother and author Cherie Burns has written, than being undercut in front of his kids when she is trying to appropriately assert her authority as one of the heads of the household.
The more opportunities you take to solidify the team and nurture it, the stronger it will be and the more natural it will feel to take on challenges together. Dr. Gotzis recommends that after a weekend visit with his kids, you both take a few hours off on Monday morning if possible. "It's a way of reconnecting and getting back into the mode of intimacy," he told me. For full-time stepmothers, time away as a couple is paramount. Make sure a childless vacation is a regular yearly occurrence. Feel free to make your bedroom a stepchild-free zone. A weekly date night will demonstrate to everyone, especially yourselves, that the marriage is a priority. It also will give you and your husband valuable time to be adults—not just co-parents—together.
Easier said than done, you may be thinking. My husband won't do that stuff. A husband confused about how to balance his bonds with you and with his kids would do well to hear that your requests are reasonable from an outside, neutral source, such as a book, a minister or rabbi, or a marriage counselor. Prioritizing your marriage is a condition you must insist on if your partnership is to survive the tumultuous early years of remarriage with children and flourish during the later years, which present difficulties of their own.
In a remarriage with children, deciding whether and when to have a child together—a mutual child, in the lingo of remarriage experts—is often the issue the couple will face. Five of the women I interviewed for this book were already mothers when they became stepmothers and were not interested in having more children. Two others had no children going in and were happy to keep it that way. The rest told me that having at least one child together had been a precondition of their marriage.
According to Berkeley, California, stepfamily expert Anne Bernstein, Ph.D., roughly one-quarter of couples in a remarriage with children will have an "ours baby" within eighteen months of marrying. Many women may fantasize that a baby will be their ticket to the inner sanctum of a family where they have felt like an outsider, and in some cases, this may actually be the case. Having a child of our own, including the shift in priorities and energy that comes along with it, can in fact make an ex-wife's resentment or a stepchild's rejecting behavior less of an issue. A number of women told me that a great deal of their unhappiness and stress seemed to recede when they had a baby of their own. Brenda said, "It was like, when we had our son, my husband's ex finally realized this was for real. It finally got into her head to stop calling and bothering us all the time with little made-up things. And I didn't have time to second-guess how she and my husband were parenting my stepson. I was busy. I had a chance to do it the way I wanted now." Dora told me, "When I had Belle, the anger melted away. It was just gone." Many women also told me that when they had children of their own to protect, they better understood their husbands' indulgent parenting styles and refusals to hear any criticism of their kids. "Now I have my own child, and I'm that annoying parent who thinks she's perfect," Cee-Cee said with a laugh, recalling how frustrated she had been when her husband couldn't hear that his son was, well, imperfect.
Of course, having a baby is far from the answer to all stepfamily problems. It can create difficulties and stresses as well. For example, ex-wives feel more threatened by a stepmother's pregnancy and show their distress more often than do ex-husbands in parallel situations. Many of us know firsthand the annoyance of the asymmetry in which our blessed development, something we may have fantasized about for so long, something that makes us so happy, is someone else's worst nightmare, reactivating her anger and resentment. Having a baby will probably stir up problems with stepchildren as well. I vividly remember my stomach-dropping disappointment when we told my stepdaughters about my pregnancy and they began to sob. Over the next nine months, I sometimes could not help but feel that they were trying to sabotage what I had (naively) imagined would be a time of perfect bliss for my husband and me. Of course, from their perspective, I was ruining their lives.
Although a baby's arrival can link "family" members in ways you had not imagined, bringing stepchildren closer and creating a feeling that you all have someone in common now, it can also bring out a kind of wild maternal protectiveness and paranoia, an ugly urge to push stepchildren away. Sarah told me that she grew enraged at her ten-year-old stepson when he observed, "The baby looks like an alien." The baby did look a little like an alien, but no mother wants to hear such a thing. It did not help that the stepson's tone was laced with the kind of hostility that comes from the fear of being excluded, or that the boy's father said nothing in response. Sarah told me she got over it quickly but noted, "Ever since Rosie was born, a part of me wants to build a little fence around me, her, and my husband. It sounds petty, and I can't tell anyone else this, but sometimes I want it to be just us." In this regard, Sarah is more typical than she might imagine. A littlespoken secret of stepmothering is that we love our own children more and may occasionally fantasize about life as "the only ones." In my case, in spite of a rocky start, I felt more tolerance for my stepdaughters—they were, after all, getting older, more charming, and more interesting every day—after my first son was born. And I was amazed that their affection for him transcended their early resentment toward me. In this way, my son really was a kind of stepfamily salvation: my stepdaughters gave him a chance, which made me want to give them one.
Of course, many couples struggle with the issue of whether to have a child together. When a husband already has children, what feels like an imperative to his wife can feel optional to him, and such a fundamental difference in agendas and feelings can be devastating. More specifically, men who divorce and remarry often feel deeply ambivalent about having more children, suspecting that doing so will harm the children they already have and fearing that this marriage also may fail, leaving them juggling custody and visitation issues with two sets of children. Regardless of what they may have said before the marriage, many men may balk when it comes to actually having another child. Not surprisingly, these negotiations are often remarkably charged, and they almost always touch on other issues, such as stepfamily dynamics, feelings of being excluded, and financial pressures. This is the situation one of my favorite subjects, Kendra, found herself in.
Kendra: "I Thought We Would Be a Family"
Kendra struck me as upbeat, sunny, and energetic the day I first met her. She had prepared a wonderful lunch and immediately put me at ease with her warmth and solicitousness. On the wall near the table where we sat in her dining room was a framed display of mementos from her wedding—the vows; an invitation; photos of Kendra, her husband, and his daughter, who looked to be about ten. Kendra surprised me by telling me, right after cheerily offering me a plate of hummus, that her marriage was "at a crisis point" and she was considering leaving it soon. She explained that she felt that her husband, Donald, didn't give their marriage the priority it deserved, that there was strain over finances, and that there were arguments over whether to have a child together. For Kendra, all these issues were inextricably linked.
"I thought we would be a family," she said. "My husband is Mr. Mom. He was always very maternal. So shortly after he and I were married and it suited her, his ex-wife decided she didn't want her daughter living with her anymore. She had this boyfriend Sadie didn't like. And she told us, 'I'm leaving, and Sadie wants to stay at her [current] school. You should get a place for her here.'"
It was a stretch for Kendra and Donald to get a place in the expensive town where the girl wanted to stay. Donald was in debt from the divorce, so Kendra used the proceeds from the sale of her own home and her life savings to buy and renovate a place where they could all live together. Donald subsequently lost his job, and now she was working a sixty-hour week to pay Sadie's private school tuition. She felt "burned" on many levels.
"If I have a complaint about my husband, it's that I'm still not first," she said. "Sadie lives in the same house with me, yet she never even says hello. Donald could have put an end to this long ago. But he won't ask her for even that. And now her mom is suddenly interested in her moving back with her—after years of not doing anything for Sadie or with her."
When I ask Kendra whether there was ever a conversation about Sadie moving in with them, or whether they might enroll her in public school, she laughed and said:
Oh, no. No one asked me how I felt about it! And I didn't know what I was in for! We were married when she was ten, and she was with us several nights a week and we were a family. Tickle trains and braiding-hair sessions and unconditional love kind of things. Now she's a teenager, and this is her home. She wants her own space; she wants to separate. I understand, but the way Donald lets her act—I'm not on the same page with him! And about school—my husband would never do that. Better for us to suffer than for her to have to switch. That's pretty much how it is around here.
Just then, Kendra's stepdaughter came in the house. She grunted in response to Kendra's greeting but offered me a dazzling smile before slamming the door on her way out again. Kendra smiled wryly. "Usually, there's not even a grunt hello," she said. "See, Donald's almost afraid of her. So he hasn't said, 'First priority is to treat Kendra with respect and make sure that because she does all this stuff for you—drives you to school, pays your allowance, helps with your homework—you at least acknowledge her presence when you walk into a room where she's sitting.'"
It was clear to me that Kendra felt exploited and was frustrated that her relationship with Sadie was so unreciprocal. She struck me as remarkably hands-on, and I wondered how much of her frustration stemmed from this fact. Might it reduce her resentment, I wondered, if she started doing less? I remarked that she seemed to feel like part of the woodwork. "Oh, yeah!" she replied. "I'm paying the bills, and that's what bothers me. I feel very ignored. And the problem is that she's never gotten into trouble. I really wish you wouldn't do that, but I will let you is my husband's attitude pretty much. So Sadie rules the roost."
When I told Kendra that her situation sounded stressful, she paused, then nodded and said, "I'm wondering if I can handle it, or if I want to. Sadie's living off of me but not doing anything for me. I feel so ... underappreciated. Early on, I would ask him, 'Are we ever going to get married?' Joking around. And he would say, 'When Sadie is ready.' At the time, I liked his devotion to his daughter, but now ... now I realize that I get the short end of the stick a lot. That's why I say to you, I'm number two."
Kendra took a deep breath and seemed to be considering whether to go on. Then she plunged ahead. "I married my husband because I loved him, not for the money. But all these years later, I think only women who marry wealthy can do this! If Sadie can go to camp for the summer, or if he can afford to whisk you away on a vacation when you really need one, that would really help. As it is, I feel my husband is living off me but not protecting me from his daughter, who I'm also supporting!"
Feeling exploited and unsupported by her husband and disrespected by his daughter had had emotional repercussions, Kendra explained. For quite some time, she had felt no love or sexual desire for Donald.
A couple of years ago, Sadie said to Donald, "If you and Kendra have a baby, I will never spend another night in this house again." And I think that Donald remembered that. He knows our finances haven't been good, but ... somehow in May of 20051 got pregnant. I guess my birth control failed.
When I told him, he said, "What did you do? You did this behind my back!" I said, "No! It was an accident." I didn't know how much he didn't want to have a child until that moment. I married him under the impression that we were going to have a baby. That's important for you to know. I would never have married him without [the agreement of] having my own baby! Our vows are right up there. In his vows, he says [we're] the two most important women in [his] life, and hopefully a little boy to come.
I was struck by Kendra's invocation of their marriage vows, especially the part about "the two most important women in [his] life" Kendra's dilemma seemed to be intricately tied not only to their financial problems but also to Donald's inability to prioritize his marriage, to set Kendra apart. Kendra told me that she refused when Donald told her he wanted her to have an abortion. But she ended up having a miscarriage, and in some corner of her mind, she wondered whether losing the baby was caused by the psychological stress of their fighting. Shortly thereafter, she began thinking about divorcing Donald.
I think I realized from that day that he accused me of getting pregnant on purpose, I didn't want to have a baby with him, would not have a baby with him. We didn't have a lot of money, and we still don't, but the money wasn't all. What mattered was his daughter feeling that way. And this is what was going to dictate the fact that he and I were never going to have a baby. That's how it is around here. This child has a lot of power.
For a time, I tried to tell myself that I could do it, I could parent this girl and not have a child of my own. But is this the authentic life that I want? For me? I have no control over how she ends up and how she lives her life and how she appears to be to everybody else, because I haven't been allowed to parent in the way that I could and [that] could benefit her. And so I feel like I am wasting my time.
Kendra told me that she understood the other reasons that Donald didn't want to have a baby. At nearly fifty, he was tired and wanted to put the days of diapers behind him. But she also felt manipulated by how he presented his take on the matter.
I feel like, I know you've had enough sleepless nights and you're tired, but at one point you were going to do that for me, and now you're not going to do that for me. With no discussion. What about me? I didn't get the baby and the bonding and the good stuff?
He talks about how "there's nowhere to put it." I say, "Come on, we could build over the garage, or somebody would give something up for a baby. That's the least of it!"
Kendra told me she was going to spend the next weeks trying to figure out whether she could afford to have a child on her own. If she couldn't, she might just stick it out with Donald. But mothering wasn't the only thing on her mind. She seemed to feel equally frustrated about not being able to "parent" her stepdaughter the way she would like to. As I was packing up to go, she shook her head and said, "This could be a failed attempt at trying to be the best stepmother in the world and not being allowed to. That's how I see it."
Beneath all of Kendra and Donald's issues—finances, the decision whether to have a child, Donald's ineffectual parenting, Kendra's feelings of being unappreciated and second-best—lurked the biggest problem of all, their "meta-issue": not knowing how to fight. According to stepfamily experts, not having this skill sinks more remarriages with children than anything else, but with it, you can beat even the worst odds.
The first thing you should know, and probably already have learned, is that there will be fights—knock-down, drag-out fights that are virtually Wagnerian in their intensity, epic sweep, and, perhaps, decibel level. Stepfamily researcher James Bray found that the first twenty-four months of a remarriage with children are characterized by intense conflict and unhappiness, even in couples that will later become harmonious and happy. Patricia Papernow has found that the settling-in period for remarriage is four to seven years. Some couples, she notes, will take as long as twelve years to reach a more serene stage of stepfamily development.
Contrary to what most people think, however, fighting does not doom a relationship, or even necessarily indicate big problems. In fact, according to marital experts, it's not fighti ng itself or even the frequency of fighting that leads to marital instability. It's the way people fight. Some fighting styles can destroy a marriage, while others can actually strengthen it. The good news, then, is threefold: you can learn how to fight; it is not so scary to fight when you know you are a team; and fighting well can actually solidify your relationship.
By contrast, not fighting, or fighting the wrong way, is bad for you and for your marriage. In a study of almost four thousand men and women in Massachusetts, 32 percent of the men and 23 percent of the women said they suppressed their feelings during a quarrel. Bottling up their feelings did not seem to have a measurable health impact on the male study participants. But for women, holding it in increased the risk of dying over the ten-year study period to four times that of the women who always told their husbands their feelings in a disagreement. Another study, at Western Washington University, demonstrated that such "self-silencing" increased the risk of depression, eating disorders, and heart disease for women. And researchers in Utah found that the way a couple interacted in an argument was as important a heart disease risk factor as smoking or high cholesterol. In this study of 150 couples, men's risk of heart disease increased if their arguments with their wives involved a battle for control. ("Why can't you just admit that I'm right?" and "We're going to do it my way" are examples of a controlling argument style.) It made no difference whether they or their wives were the ones making the controlling comments.
Everybody who is married fights, and the health and mental health risks of fighting the wrong way are clear. But remarried couples with children probably fight more than other married couples. Why is this so? Mostly, it seems, because differences assert themselves so quickly and so undeniably in this type of partnership. This is because, as family therapist Lois Braverman told me, "going from being a couple to being a couple with a child adds a level of complexity and introduces a dimension that creates differences: How much attention should a child have? What is too much attention, and what is too little? How much independence should they have? And so on. It also introduces judgment."
Usually, the addition of a child comes over time, after the partners have hammered out differences or agreed to disagree about them. Introduce a child who belongs to only one spouse at the outset, however, and the differences, judgments, and stresses are remarkably compounded. For example, Sue Johnson, Ph.D., author of Hold Me Tight, told me, "Couples in a remarriage with children face powerful issues of belonging, which can create tremendous uncertainty and stress." Your husband may feel that he's a bad father for asking his kids to deal with change and accept you. You may feel shut out if the kids always seem to come first with him, unsure whether you count and whether he really needs you. Such basic fears compound the fact that kids create stress and make intimacy harder to achieve from the second the two of you come together. "It's almost universally true," Braverman said, "that when you watch someone else with their kid, the kid seems indulged. It's one thing to watch your girlfriend with her kids for an hour on Saturday and tolerate it for the afternoon. It's another thing entirely to live with it. Then you feel you have to say something!"
Remarried couples with children do not just fight more often. We fight in unique ways, and knowing what they are can help you in your quest to argue effectively. First and perhaps most important, we fight harder and sooner. Psychoanalyst Michael Vincent Miller, Ph.D., has written that marriage, like childhood, has developmental stages. After a giddy romantic period, he theorizes, comes a period of disillusionment, when members of the couple feel disappointed about the discrepancy between what they had hoped for and what they have, and perhaps even feel deceived by their spouses. Often this period of disillusionment brings up feelings of failure, which are so upsetting that we tend to lash out at our spouses rather than acknowledge our fear that things might fall apart, as well as our own role in bringing this state of affairs about with our unrealistic expectations. In a remarriage with children, this period of disillusionment arrives especially quickly and forcefully, shattering the honeymoon period—in which first-marrieds may luxuriate for years—before it has even taken root.
All heterosexual couples are likely to experience what Anne Bernstein calls the gendered overreacting/underreacting dynamic, as well as what E. Mavis Hetherington and couples researcher John Gottman, Ph.D., call the pursuer/distancer dynamic. Remarrieds with children are no exception. "Your son is being so rude to me," a woman might begin. "He's just a teenager," her partner, the boy's father, responds. "It's not that bad." Bernstein explained to me what happens next: "Now the woman has no choice but to amplify, in order to convince her partner that her concern is important and that she is not irrational." How often have we found ourselves yelling at our husbands, ratcheting up our affect in precise reverse proportion to his flat and terse replies? Gottman explains that the dynamic in which women pursue and persist while men distance or withdraw may actually have a physiological basis. He found that in disagreements, men get more aroused more quickly than women do, experiencing a steep rise in heart rate and blood pressure. Fearful of losing control, they withdraw, feeling that it is the "safest" option for decreasing the conflict they are experiencing. Imagine a man's surprise and frustration—not to mention his sense of being unfairly badgered—when retreating only increases his wife's desire to make her point. And imagine—this is probably easy to do—her sense of being abandoned as he retreats into a silence punctuated only by the occasional, lacerating accusation "You're irrational!"
This dynamic is present in all marriages, but because remarried couples with children have more to fight about and fight more often, it is more obvious and more difficult for them. As one woman with stepchildren explained to me, "I want to talk, and he wants me to shut up. Believe me, while we were dating, I never thought we would turn into the Lockhorns. It's such a cliché, and I hate it."
In the case of remarrieds with children, there may be a twist to this gendered dynamic: in bringing up a problem with the children, the wife herself becomes the problem. "How many times has he said, 'It's not a big deal, but you're turning it into one,'" Greta said to me one day, describing how her preteen stepdaughter pointedly and aggressively ignored her whenever the stepfamily was together. Greta's husband may actually have been trying to comfort her initially—Don't take it to heart; it's not a big deal—but it sounded like a dismissal, as if he were minimizing Greta's torment. Later, it turned into a criticism. Greta felt shut out twice, both ignored by her stepdaughter and misunderstood and censured by her husband for having feelings about being ignored.
A particular type of emotional censorship is more common among remarried or re-partnered couples than among first-marrieds. James Bray describes it as a tendency to communicate—by pointed inattention, impatience, and changing the subject—that one partner does not want to hear about the other's previous relationship. In this type of communication breakdown, the person simply does not want to know anything that might undermine his or her romantic view of the relationship. The problem with this approach is that in subsequent marriages especially, letting a partner communicate about the past can clear the way to a less problematic present. For example, a man might find that his wife does not want to hear anything about his ex. Yet by not listening to him talk about his prior marriage, she will miss the opportunity to learn about his fears and might misinterpret his behavior. This dynamic can go both ways.
David did not want to hear about Mandy's previous relationship with a man he considered unworthy of her. Without realizing it, he shut Mandy down every time she began to talk about feeling shunted into a babysitter role when her ex went out—often all night long—while his kids were there. By doing this, David missed an important clue as to why Mandy—otherwise so competent and self-confident—panicked and became furious if he so much as wanted to run to the grocery store while his seven-year-old twin boys were at their house. Had he not censored Mandy, he would have learned that for her, being left alone with her ex's kids had meant being exploited; she was frightened that this might happen with David as well. Listening gave David an opportunity to assure her that he understood and would never take advantage of her, but that sometimes a trip to the grocery store is just a trip to the grocery store.
Remarrieds with children might find themselves embroiled as well in what Anne Bernstein calls "conflict by proxy," a dynamic in which one person in a family takes on another's emotional work. A stepmother is likely to experience conflict by proxy in two ways, and recognizing it is her best way out.
First, conflict by proxy may be the way a twosome avoids direct conflict. For example, a divorced mother might enlist her children to carry her pain and anger at her ex-husband, so that they act out toward their father or, more often, his wife. Or children, even adult children, may provoke their stepmother, which feels safer than confronting their father, who is likely more loved and more feared.
Second, in addition to functioning as a kind of "free-fire zone" in detoured parent-child conflicts or in conflicts between ex-spouses, women in remarriages with children frequently find themselves "drafted" to act as proxies for their husbands. While I was interviewing my subjects and talking to psychologists, it became clear to me that it is common for a woman to act on a man's unvoiced issues, essentially having his feelings—which he may find frightening or inappropriate—for him. For example, Bernstein notes that sometimes when a stepmother and a stepdaughter fight, the father has actually unconsciously orchestrated the tensions so that his wife and daughter can play out his anger and fear. As they go at it, he recedes into the background, very likely telling himself that "women are crazy."
This was precisely the situation with Bernstein's patients Nell and Ken. Ken's young adult daughter, Darla, made it clear to Nell that she wanted nothing to do with her stepmother by ignoring her, grunting in response to her questions, and generally treating her badly. Ken, who felt embarrassed and put on the spot, did nothing when Darla acted this way. Understandably, Nell felt furious and abandoned. But all the conflict between Nell and Darla, and between Nell and Ken about Darla, was a distraction, it turned out. Ken didn't like the way Darla was acting any more than Nell did. But he was afraid that asking Darla to change would drive her away or make her behavior worse. Once he stepped up to the plate and asked Darla to treat Nell better, Nell stopped feeling so angry toward Darla and toward Ken, at which point Ken realized that he had issues with his daughter, issues he had heretofore "handed off" to his wife to fight out for him.
Bernstein describes yet another factor in remarried couples' fights, called "the vicious cycle." In this dynamic, the wife complains about a child's behavior; her husband ignores her; she persists, feeling unpartnered and unsupported; he feels that she is a witch who is on his kid's case all the time. If you ease up, Bernstein suggested when I interviewed her, he may see the problems himself and warm up to you for seeming tolerant toward his child.
And what of the father who doesn't have a disciplinarian bone in his body? To break the vicious cycle, it may help to tell yourself, "I can't come into a dysfunctional family and change everything," Lois Braverman suggested to me. You might even tell yourself, "It's not my problem, and that's a luxury." However, both Bernstein and Braverman were quick to point out that "checking out" should never mean being a doormat. One way to break the vicious cycle, Patricia Papernow suggested, is to ask your husband very calmly to tell his children, "I can't tell you how to feel, but when you're here, I expect you to be polite to your stepmother. You don't have to like her, but you may not treat her like a piece of furniture. Say hello and look her in the eye when she speaks to you." If you ask him to do this in the right way and at the right time, refusing to escalate or take the bait should he hem, haw, or accuse, he is unlikely to deny you so reasonable a request.
More specifically, Papernow suggested a communication formula she calls "soft-hard-soft" when making a request of your spouse on a charged topic. For example, rather than saying, "You let your kids treat me badly, and I've had it," try saying it another way: "I know it's hard for you that there are sometimes tensions between your kids and me [soft]. But could you ask them to respond to me when I walk into a room where they're sitting and I say hello to them [hard, but in the form of a request, not a criticism]? I don't like to put more pressure on you, because I know you're trying so hard. I really appreciate that. It's just that it hurts my feelings and makes it difficult to keep on trying when I feel ignored or treated badly by your kids [soft]." When remarriage with children feels complicated, a simple formula like this, one that cushions a hard request between two loving acknowledgments that the situation is difficult and you appreciate your spouse, is easy to remember and may save you untold aggravation.
Two other skills—putting it off and putting it away—can also help temper even the most passionate and hopeless-feeling conflicts. First, scheduling a time to argue sounds crazy, but it makes a certain amount of sense, marriage experts say. If your partner shuts down a discussion or says, "Not now, I'm busy," take a deep breath and say, "You're right. We're not having much success talking about this right now. What time should we discuss it?" Difficult as it may be to keep your cool when your husband seems to be shutting down, it's well worth trying this trick, which can help a wife seem more rational in her husband's eyes and will increase the likelihood that both partners will be calmer when the hot topic is discussed later. Second, knowing when to walk away from a fight is one of the most useful weapons in your arsenal. Walking away is not the same as stonewalling or bottling up your feelings. It means making a conscious decision to let certain things go so that you can focus on the issues that really matter to you. One woman told me, "He finally told his kids, after five years of me asking, that if they couldn't be nice to me, they shouldn't come over. And they got more polite. He did what I asked, and so I don't ride him about the little things his kids might do. He's done his part."
The Four Horsemen and the Good Fight
Sometimes it helps to have analysis boiled down to its essence, advice reduced to its simplest form. The next time you and your partner are having "the big fight" over his kids—the one you have over and over—consider that things can go differently. Psychoeducation—learning what is normal and what helps—is the key, couples experts say. John Gottman has studied more than two thousand married couples for more than twenty years and discovered four attitudes that predict dissolution of a relationship. Gottman explains that each of the "four horsemen" paves the way to the next. Avoid these four ways of fighting, and you and your partner will dramatically increase your chances of remaining together (relatively) happily ever after.
Criticism = Attacking your partner's personality or character (rather than something he has done), usually with the intent of demonstrating that you are right and he is wrong. Using phrases such as "You always...," "You never...," and "Why are you so..."
Contempt = Being insulting to your partner or openly disrespecting him. Employing insults, name-calling, hostile humor or mockery, sneering, or eye rolling.
Defensiveness = Denying responsibility, making excuses, meeting one complaint with another, or not paying attention to what the other person is saying. Using phrases such as "Yes, but..."; "That's not true, you're the one who..."; and "I do not ..."
Stonewalling = Refusing to respond, withdrawing, or physically removing yourself from the conflict. Far from being "neutral" or helpful, this tactic is provocative. Men tend to engage in it much more often than women do.
Gottman's research also concentrates on precisely what happens when successful couples fight. According to Gottman, these couples make five positive remarks about their spouse for every critical comment they make during an argument; do not escalate or "kitchen sink" (throw more and more issues into the argument, such as "You don't like my kids? Well let's talk about your stupid mother and how nasty she was last Thursday!"); break the tension with jokes and distractions; and always make repairs after an argument.
According to Sue Johnson, remarried couples, given their very specific challenges, must do one thing above all others: "Sharing basic needs and fears—about being an outsider, about creating stress for your kids by remarrying and feeling divided in your loyalties, about wanting to know you count—is what helps more than anything else in weathering the storm of creating a new family." For women with stepchildren, that may mean swallowing your pride and making yourself vulnerable just when you feel most misunderstood and betrayed. But it is also likely to open the door to greater emotional closeness and a partnership that beats the odds.
There are kids who are not your own in this partnership, rendering it qualitatively different from others. Recognizing the unique characteristics of a remarriage with children and knowing that the everyday aggravations actually have a name might help stepmothers see that they are not alone and that their "families" are not so unusual or abnormal. And tackling these issues as a team can actually solder together a couple that they are threatening to pull apart.
The Dripolator Effect vs. the Percolator Effect
Anyone who has ever lived with a sullen teen or preteen knows that if you're not careful to separate your moods from your kid's, he or she can render the tone of the whole household stressful and lugubrious. Family therapist James Bray has noted that this effect is intensified in remarriages with children, with the normal order of things turned on its head. In a first marriage, a troubled child may affect the marriage to a small degree, but a troubled marriage will greatly affect the child. Bray calls this the top-down, or "dripolator," effect. Unhappy parents make bad disciplinarians and poor confidants, and high levels of marital conflict are known to contribute to a wide range of emotional and behavior problems in a child. By contrast, a strong and healthy marital bond in a first marriage has a positive effect on a child, instilling feelings of confidence, well-being, and security that all foster an ability to adapt.
But in a remarriage with children, Bray notes, the interaction between marriage and parenting flows in the opposite direction—from the kids up to the couple. He calls this the bottom-up, or "percolator," effect. In a remarriage, marital happiness has little effect on the adjustment of a child, who very likely has little invested in his or her parent and stepparent staying together and often harbors fantasies that they will divorce so that his or her parents can reconcile. Yet the child's moods, tantrums, and issues are likely to have a great impact on the couple, virtually determining, in too many cases, whether the marriage is happy or not. The reason, according to Bray, is this: "When an unhappy child acts out, he doesn't just make the mood of the household miserable; he begins to divide the stepmother, who is likely to become increasingly critical of him, from the parent, who is likely to become defensive and increasingly annoyed at his wife's criticisms of his child."
Like so many of us, Cee-Cee—whom we met earlier as the easygoing and affable mother of a preschooler and stepmother of a teenage boy—walked directly into this trap. Shortly after her husband and his two boys—who were nine and eleven at the time—moved in with her, she decided to take on the issue of the boys' table manners. "I just thought, I refuse to eat at a table with pigs!" Cee-Cee told me. But the more she pushed, albeit politely, the more the boys seemed to resent her, responding with sullen grunts and even getting up and walking away from the table when she spoke. Although this may not be entirely surprising, Cee-Cee was unprepared for her husband Ned's response. "Ned basically said, 'Get off their backs already!' Like I was being some kind of harpy. I'm a real 'get along and let the little stuff go' type of person. But their manners were atrocious, and I didn't feel I had to put up with it." Part of the difficulty was likely that Ned felt criticized. It was as if every time Cee-Cee asked her stepsons to please not grab a piece of meat off the serving platter with their hands, her husband felt that she was saying, "You didn't do a good job raising them!" Like Cee-Cee, we often feel unfairly stereotyped as wicked for wanting something as simple as minimally good table manners. After a number of these experiences, whenever our stepchildren act sullen, we may relive the injustice, experiencing all over again the feeling of being misunderstood. During the final stage of this cycle, we may find ourselves in a worse mood than the children were when they acted out.
But it is possible for couples to change this dynamic so that the stepmother is seen not as a shrew but as a powerful ally to her husband—and his kids. Psychologist Lauren Ayers told me one day in her office, "I've often told my patients here for family and couple work that I wish every kid had a stepmother. Stepmothers usually have higher expectations for their husbands' kids than their husbands do. And that can be really motivating, healthy, and helpful for the kids in the long run."
When it comes to "interventions" about a stepchild's behavior, a suggestion posed as a neutral question ("I think the kids are old enough to load the dishwasher themselves. What do you think?") can make a world of difference in your husband's receptivity, Lois Braverman of the Ackerman Institute for the Family told me. "It's the difference between feeling put on the spot and feeling supported," she said. An attitude of "we're in this together" on the part of the couple also has the benefit of restoring the correct flow of power to stepfamily relations and blunting the impact of a child's negativity.
Stepmother and author Cherie Burns recommends reversing the percolator effect by never pandering to a stepchild in a black mood ("What's wrong? Are you mad at me? Did something bad happen?") and by refusing to take it personally. Being busy and acting as if you don't even notice are the best policies, she suggests, to avoid creating a "stepchild-dominated environment." Kids may think they want to be in charge of the home and its moods, but in reality the most reassuring thing for them, Burns says, is the reassertion of the rightful order of adult-child relations. That means showing them that their rotten mood or nasty attitude will not sink the family ship. Even if you don't feel it, things will go more smoothly when you convey the attitude "We'll all sail through this just fine."
The Biological Force Field and Middle Ground
When you marry a man with children, you are not just setting out to forge a relationship and a world with someone you love. You are also entering into a web of habits, preferences, inside jokes, problems, hopes, antagonisms, rituals, and history that precedes you and very likely excludes you. The sensation of being an outsider, a feeling that things are set up to preclude intimacy, particularly in the first one to three years of a partnership with a man with children, is something many women experience. Lotte, a forty-three-year-old writer, told me that she was shocked to discover that the family computer—used by her new partner's ten-year-old daughter and fifteen-year-old son—was in his bedroom, the most heavily trafficked room in the house. When she told him she would prefer that the bedroom be a more private space, an argument ensued about her "not understanding kids," and it was months before the couple agreed to move the computer to the dining room. Olivia told me that her three adult stepdaughters "had an amazing ability to make me feel like a guest in my own home when they were over." And Lorna marveled that her then fiancé had let his nine-year-old son decide that she would not be allowed to sleep over on "his" weekends with Dad.
All these adult partners had run up against what psychologist James Bray calls "the biological force field," a strong bond between a parent and a child that can feel like an actual physical force keeping us at bay, repelling our efforts to be part of the family. But we seldom comment on it for fear of seeming petty. (This problem may be less severe for women who bring their own children to the marriage. In these cases, the woman is not so clearly an outsider in her husband's "mini-family," having a mini-family of her own.) The biological force field will ebb over time if husband and wife are committed to making theirs the central relationship in the family system, actively building what psychologist Sonia Nevis has termed "middle ground." Without this commitment, as we've seen, the married couple will likely remain the weakest relationship in the web of stepfamily relations.
"It was a process of coming together as a couple for a long time after we were married," Jonathan, the entertainment executive we met in chapter 5, explained to me of his partnership with Julia. (Remember that Jonathan has two older sons from a previous marriage and two younger daughters with Julia.) "My wife felt hurt when my older son [Mark] did things to show her he was here first. Mark would intentionally talk about things that had happened before Julia came along, so she wouldn't be able to participate in the conversation at all." On more than one occasion, Julia simply "zoned out" during a long, intricately detailed conversation about old times to which she could contribute nothing more than "That sounds like it was fun," over and over. In private later, Julia told Jonathan, with irritation, that she was tired of the dynamic in which he allowed Mark to put her on the outside—and keep her there. Time was part of the cure for what ailed Jonathan, Julia, and Mark, but there was also a commitment on the part of Jonathan and Julia to use that time to strengthen their own relationship. "Over the years, Julia and I made our own history, with Mark and his brother and apart from them," Jonathan said.
The "apart from them" part was crucial, because it helped Jonathan and Julia forge the "middle ground" that Patricia Papernow describes as "paths of easy connection where the partners don't even need to think about it." Unlike first-marrieds, Julia and Jonathan and other remarrieds with kids do not automatically have a lot of middle ground—whether it's going to the opera, reading the paper in a certain order on Sunday, or loving karaoke—before the introduction of kids, who tend to erode middle ground. The more Jonathan and Julia made a priority of "couple time"—which could mean just a half-hour alone together while Mark was visiting or a whole weekend together when his sons weren't around—the more middle ground the two of them shared, the less exclusionary the biological force field felt, and the better Julia could weather Mark's attempts to exclude her. Jonathan told me, "Eventually, Mark just stopped focusing on the past so much. I think he got a clear sense that there was a present with Julia now and that he could enter that."
Papernow notes that "much of what is needed to strengthen the partnership in a remarriage with children is counterintuitive." When Jonathan's sons heard Julia urging him to take them out to dinner one night every weekend for several weeks in a row while she stayed home to catch up on work, for example, their stepmother stopped seeming like quite so much of a "Dad hog." And Jonathan got a realistic sense about one-on-one time with his sons, particularly Mark. He enjoyed it immensely but saw that Mark, like all teens, was not always easy to be around. He began voicing some of the realistic criticisms of his son's behavior that Julia had felt herself but that Jonathan couldn't bear to hear from her. And in this way, over the years, Julia often found herself more able to take the role of supporting the boy rather than feeling compelled to point out his flaws or nasty moments to a defensive Jonathan. Predictably, this shift endeared Julia to Jonathan even more.
Julia also made a point to socialize one night every week with her friends from before the marriage. At first Jonathan protested, but Julia insisted that sometimes she needed to be with people who made her feel like an "insider" instead of an outsider. Her friends put her at ease, understood her, shared lots of middle ground with her, and made her feel less consumed by the difficulties inherent in life with stepchildren. Papernow explains that this is one more way that second partnerships with children are different from first partnerships: "If the husband is coming from a first-family model, he is likely to say, 'That's not good. If she can't spend time with our family, something is wrong.' But second marriages with kids are a different thing entirely. You can't use the map of the first family with a second family. Time away with friends, stepping out for the evening without your husband or his kids, can actually make this second marriage with kids work better. It's rejuvenating and prevents stepparent burnout." The surprising bottom line: sometimes surrendering to the biological force field, or stepping out of it for an evening, can strengthen the couple bond and build middle ground.
The Ex Factor
In previous centuries, remarriages occurred almost exclusively after the death of a spouse. With the rise of remarriage after divorce, however, a new and confounding variable has emerged: the ex. The presence of an ex-spouse is not a happy thing for the women I interviewed. In contrast, a fair number of the men I spoke to described their wives' exes on the spectrum from "uninvolved, so not really a problem" to "fine" and even "basically a standup guy." These sentiments echo an interesting finding from comprehensive studies on divorce and remarriage with children: an ex-wife generally spells more trouble than an ex- husband.
In spite of a recent trend toward more involved fathering, mothers are generally thought of, and generally act as, "primary parents." They are more likely, for example, to have custody and to be the daily presence in a child's life. As such, mothers are more likely to make appointments and take children to them, to interface more regularly with teachers, and to have strong agendas, wishes, and expectations regarding how things such as homework, laundry, and lunches are done. In short, compared to a male ex, a female ex is likely to be more involved in the details of her children's lives and more involved with her ex's remarried family—and to feel that she should be and should have the final say. All this involvement translates into increased opportunities for conflict. Often the stepmother, because she is a woman and so presumed responsible for child care, will bear the brunt of the ex-wife's expectations about or disappointment over how things go during a stay with Dad. One woman reported to me that her husband's ex had called her in a fury after her twelve-year-old daughter had been there for a weekend. "Why aren't you making sure my daughter wears deodorant when she's with you?" the ex had demanded. The stepmother observed, "I'm not allowed to set limits about her TV habits or what she wears on a cold day, because her mom goes nuts if she hears about it and says I'm overreaching. Yet I'm somehow to blame for her personal hygiene?" She was clearly outraged—and understandably so—by the typical stepmother conundrum: the husband's ex who wants to have it both ways, giving us responsibility but not granting authority.
Many women find themselves in much worse situations. E. Mavis Hetherington found that resentment is more sustained in divorced women than in divorced men. She also found that the remarriage of an ex-spouse tends to reactivate anger for women more than for men. In my interviews, I was told about ex-wives who were the first ones to call and congratulate the couple on their engagement or marriage, only to call back the next day to demand more child support. Women also told me, over and over, about ex-wives who wanted to renegotiate custody and visitation after the remarriage. Hetherington discovered the same tendency among her cohort of ex-wives. Mom's lingering resentment renders it nearly impossible for children to build a relationship with their stepmother, sensing that liking her would be a betrayal. This in turn creates stress for the married couple, a stress that no first marriage has to endure.
In contrast to ex-wives, ex-husbands (and here we're talking about your husband) are more likely to be friendly and welcoming to their ex's new spouse, paving the way for better relations between stepfathers and stepkids. Men have been shown to have more sustained attachments to their ex-wives, to nurture fantasies of reconciliation with them (until they re-partner), and to hope for smooth platonic sailing with exes who have re-partnered. Although this sounds good in theory, it can lead to some unexpected difficulties for their wives. Many women reported to me, often in chagrined tones, that their husbands still performed a variety of household chores for their unmarried exes. The men explained it away as a necessity: "If I don't fix the roof, it's going to leak on my kids." It is easy to understand how these chores could be used as tests or leverage by an ex-wife who is unreconciled to her ex-husband's remarriage, tends to like to stir up trouble, or wants to flex her muscles and demonstrate her ongoing clout to her "rival."
When husbands decide themselves or agree with you to cut back on their activities at their ex's home—to build what Anne Bernstein calls a "good fence"—there may well be a backlash. Usually, you are blamed and, with unfortunate frequency, denounced loudly in front of the children. The ex also may try to change visitation agreements out of spite and exhibit other vengeful behavior. According to Bernstein, "Letting go of old resentments is the most challenging part of working with post-divorce families." Sometimes, she notes, an ex-partner may continue to suffer in order to exact revenge on those she feels have mistreated her. For these ex-wives, Bernstein explains, doing too well—being able to fix a broken fuse box, laugh at a joke, or just have a civil relationship with her ex-husband—"is seen as allowing the person one feels injured by to minimize the consequences of his actions." That is, in her eyes, being happy or high functioning would let her ex-husband off the hook. So she continues to do poorly, motivated by a desire to prove that she has been deeply wronged.
Such "accusatory suffering," as psychologists Arthur and Elizabeth Seagull call it, may be an ex-wife's way of feeling powerful and has the added "benefit" of separating her children from their father after a remarriage, at the birth of a child in the remarriage, or during any other event that reopens her wounds. Just knowing that such a behavior has a name, however, can help the couple keep their balance. "Look," forty-one-year-old Lorna told me one day, interrupting her own monologue about her husband's vindictive-sounding ex, "it's always the same old story. She's the victim, and we're the bad guys. We don't believe it, and someday her own kid is not going to believe it anymore either. So we'll just wait it out."
Research shores up our commonsense suspicion that an ex-wife who does not remarry is likely to be the most troublesome, not only for us but also for her children, who may well feel that she is victimized and at a disadvantage as long as she is single and Dad is remarried. Simply put, children with single mothers have a harder time accommodating a stepparent, and knowing this may allow you to take their rejection a little less personally. Sociologist Linda Nielsen has outlined a number of additional factors that determine just how problematic an ex-wife will be. She found the highest levels of conflict when the biological mother was white, had a graduate education, and had a high household income. Why would these women—the ones who are likely to have better access to psychotherapy, as well as the luxury of time and energy to read about what's best for their kids—have the hardest time letting go of anger? Researchers suggest that it is a matter of social programming. Unlike women from other backgrounds, middle-class and upper-middle-class white women are less likely to have a tradition of sharing child-rearing duties with adults other than a spouse and are much less likely to subscribe to the "it takes a village" mentality. White women of means also likely grew up with a very "possessive mothering model" compared to women from lower-income backgrounds or from other racial groups. They tend to feel more threatened and jealous when it comes to their children having a close relationship with another adult, particularly a mother figure. (In contrast, close, loving relationships between children and a variety of parent figures are common in the West Indies, Polynesia, and Ghana, as well as in the Pueblo, Navajo, and African American cultures in the United States.) Adding to the difficulty, very educated white single mothers with high household incomes are more likely to have permissive parenting styles (high levels of warmth and low levels of control). The parenting style of the residential biological parent can play a large role in determining whether a child feels accountable for bad behavior toward another adult—a stepmother—or not. And bad behavior toward the stepmother makes for more marital discord and more stress. In addition, a permissive mother makes a normally assertive stepmother with reasonable expectations seem like a monster in comparison. Finally, if an ex-wife is a substance abuser, mentally ill, has a personality disorder, or suffers from depression, the stresses on your remarriage with children will be compounded dramatically.
The ex factor can have a profound impact on the remarried couple, especially when children are younger and visitation, child support, schooling, discipline, and other issues are on the table, "linking" the divorced spouses in fundamental ways. But life is not necessarily easier for women who marry widowers. Although most researchers have found that stepmothers, couples, and even children report better relationships in a remarriage with children when the marriage ended with death rather than divorce, women who marry widowers have challenges of their own. Florence summed it up well: "My therapist said, 'The longer your husband's ex is dead, the more sainted and powerful she'll become.' And that has definitely been the case."
Florence feels very close to her stepgrandchildren, for example, and goes to great lengths to travel to see them, to send them gifts, and to spend time with them when they are in town. But the fifth consecutive year she timed the sending of a gift to coincide with the day of her stepgrandson's birthday party and received no call of thanks or gesture of inclusion; she became angry and hurt. For the first time ever in their twenty-five-year marriage, Florence's husband called his son to the mat on Florence's behalf, asking why there had never been any acknowledgment of the gifts. Florence's forty-five-year-old stepson replied that she should stop signing her cards "Grandma Florence." "Their real grandmother is dead," he said. "Do you know what it means to me that she does that? How disrespectful it is of my mother, your first wife?" In spite of Florence's best efforts for nearly three decades and a relationship with her stepson that she characterizes as "not great, but pretty good," he felt that her desire to be a grandmother to his son was an infringement, a belittling—even a negation—of his mother. Acknowledging Florence's gifts, and her interest in having a loving relationship with her stepgrandson, was more than an issue of nomenclature for her adult stepson. It was actually a betrayal of his mother, for whom he reverently reserved the title "Grandma." Florence, meanwhile, said, "I don't care what they call me. I'm just surprised that my stepson is still so touchy. And I'm a little tired of it." She was happy when her stepson's wife recently sent her a Grandmother's Day card—exactly the acknowledgment that she had been hoping for and that her stepson did not feel comfortable extending.
Co-Parenting and Parallel Parenting
Depending on the age of your husband's children at the time of your remarriage and the level of conflict in his relationship with his ex, you may be drafted into co-parenting, parallel parenting, or just watching from the sidelines. The need for flexibility and negotiation is paramount, and until the marriage has built what Anne Bernstein calls "good fences and good bridges," working through the kinks can create stress for both the wife/stepmother and the couple.
Cooperative Co-Parenting: The "Best-Case Scenario"
In recent years, the concept of co-parenting has taken center stage in the discourse of divorce and remarriage. An essential component of what psychologist Constance Ahrons terms "the good divorce," cooperative co-parenting is an ideal practice in which divorced parents put their differences aside in order to form a parenting coalition in the best interests of their children. For example, they may call each other to make sure homework is getting done, agree to attend a child's sporting events at the same time, and coordinate household rules and child-rearing practices. They may get together for holidays and children's birthday parties. At the extreme end of the spectrum, a very few divorced couples may have an arrangement whereby they themselves take turns living in the children's home a certain number of days each week, rather than having the kids change households. Highly cooperative co-parenting may be catching on. Lois Braverman of the Ackerman Institute for the Family has seen an increase in co-parenting in the past decade, now that parents have become more familiar with the literature about how beneficial it is for children and states have begun to require parenting courses for divorcing parents. She told me, "There's a trend toward people making that effort, trying not to be a high-conflict, contentious divorced couple, to cooperate on parenting issues for the sake of the kids."
Cooperative co-parenting is likely the best practice for everyone in the long run. From the stepmother's perspective, happier kids who have a strong bond with their father will generally be less threatened by her and ultimately less disruptive to her marriage. And if her husband and his ex are cooperative enough that the mother actually encourages her kids to give their stepmother a chance, the children's loyalty conflicts will diminish, allowing them to be open to having a cordial—or even close—relationship with her. Yet Braverman, who has spent decades working with families of divorce and remarriage, explained that although the prognosis for kids is very good when there is a high degree of cooperation between their divorced parents, such cooperation can be difficult for the wife/stepmother. "It can leave wives with the frustrating sensation that when it comes to their own lives and their own marriages, their hands are tied," she said. "So many people are involved in these decisions." This means that something as simple as trying to arrange a romantic getaway can become absurdly complicated or even impossible. In some cases, cooperative co-parenting may go too far not only for the taste of the stepmother but also for the health of the couple and the well-being of his kids.
Laynie was married to a man whose ex "thought we were going to be like one big happy family. She actually wanted us to go on family vacations together. I had no interest in that!" Making matters more complicated, Laynie's husband lived across the street from his ex, and Laynie frequently got the feeling that "it was just sort of one big house without a boundary," a situation she set about changing by insisting that they move. Other women told me of feeling pressured to do big "family" holidays with their husbands' exes "for the sake of the kids." But such arrangements seem to work for only a few. Just one of my subjects—a remarkably easygoing woman who had no family of her own and who also had the good luck to marry a man whose ex was as laid-back and good-natured as she was—wanted to spend her holidays this way.
It is crucial for remarried couples to start and maintain rituals and traditions of their own, leaving the door open for the children to join them and sending the message that both their marriage and their invitation are real. To my mind, this imperative to nurture and protect a remarriage—which has the odds stacked against it from the outset—outweighs the obligation many divorced fathers feel to repeat the rites of a past that no longer exists for the sake of their offspring (who may actually find it awkward) or to appease an ex.
Though well-intentioned, the increasingly widespread belief that remarriage with children should be as child-centric and change-free as possible can lead to stress for everyone involved. It is easy to see how it might be stressful for the woman with stepchildren. But research also shows that high levels of closeness and involvement between exes are as confusing and counterproductive for children as are high levels of conflict. Children are likely to wonder, "If you like each other so much and get along so well, why did you get a divorce?" and feel profoundly perplexed about what exactly makes for a good relationship. The movie Stepmom takes the expectation to an absurd extreme. In it, the stepmom, played by Julia Roberts, spends Christmas with her husband, her husband's children, and his dying ex-wife in her home and is overwhelmed with gratitude when the ex invites her to join them for a "family portrait." The good news, grounded in reality and not in Hollywood fantasy, is that although the outcome of remarriage with children is brighter when exes cooperate with each other, this needn't entail spending a lot of time with your husband's ex. Also remember that the need to coordinate closely with and get "permission" from his ex will lessen as the kids get older.
If cooperative co-parenting is the ideal, parallel parenting is the norm. Texas family law expert Stewart Gagnon told me that although he has noticed "a shift in expectations, with more people now believing that the divorced couple should 'try to get along for the sake of the children' and even attend events like the children's birthday parties together, there has not been a huge shift in real behavior." Indeed, only about one-quarter of the participants in E. Mavis Hetherington's huge longitudinal study on divorce achieved what she calls "a cooperative parenting relationship" after breaking up. About half of the divorced parents she followed adopted instead an arrangement of more or less ignoring each other. Called "parallel parenting," this arrangement basically allows each ex to do his or her own thing regarding child rearing. One parent might send an e-mail announcing an intention to attend a school event rather than make a phone call, for example, and leave it to the ex to decide whether he or she will also attend. With parallel parenting, each household may have very different rules, but researchers have found that hearing "This is how we do things here" just once or twice is enough to clear up a child's confusion.
Hetherington found minimal overt or persistent conflict between exes in these arrangements. They often work quite well for the stepmother, because they allow her to have more of a voice in the child-rearing practices in her own household, especially rules about cleaning up and courtesy, which tend to be the biggest sticking points. As for the children themselves, Hetherington reports being surprised at how well they were able to adjust to the apparent contradictions of parallel parenting. Often they may have not only a sense of "two sets of rules" but also of "two homes" and even "two sets of parents." My own younger stepdaughter has always been impressive—and perhaps also typical—in her flexibility in this regard. Before she left boarding school for college, if she called us from her mother's and we asked where she was, she might say, "I'm at home" Yet she often fills out forms requesting a home address by giving ours. Sometimes when she's on the phone with a friend while staying with us, she says, "I'm hanging out with my parents in New York City."
However, kids who grow up with the parallel parenting paradigm may also develop less healthy coping strategies—namely, ways to "game the system." Accustomed to Mom and Dad not communicating, they can be manipulative about issues such as money, homework, and curfew, to name just a few. "I'm all done with my math. I did it at Mom's," your stepson might say when he simply doesn't feel like doing it. With no communication between his parents, no one will check, and he may develop the sense that there are no consequences for being dishonest. These tendencies stress a stepmother's tolerance, as she is less likely to see the child through rose-colored glasses or assess his behavior through the lens of paternal or maternal guilt. One woman reported discovering that her adolescent stepson was asking both his mother and his father for money for the same school trip. "It was a lot of money," the woman told me. "We only figured it out by happenstance, since my husband and his ex don't speak. I know he learned [to use this behavior] because his parents aren't on the same page in all kinds of ways. But I like him less when he does this stuff." A stepmother who brings such behavior to light with the intent of helping a stepchild become a more honorable and trustworthy person is likely to incite fireworks rather than change. No one likes to hear his or her child criticized, least of all a father who feels guilty for divorcing the child's mother and secretly suspects that he himself may be at the root of the child's behavior or character problems.
Whether your husband and his ex settle on a strategy of cooperative co-parenting—and do the attendant emotional and logistical work—or stumble into parallel parenting by default, each of these approaches to handling children from his previous marriage will have an impact on you. On the days when the difficulties feel insuperable, it may help to remember that co-parenting only lasts for so long. Children grow up, depart, separate from their mothers, and see things in a new light in many cases. Coordinating schedules, sporting events, holidays, drop-offs, pickups, and the like will slowly fade from your calendar, your life, and your mind. Your partnership, on the other hand, in spite of all the statistics and stresses that seem to indicate otherwise, can be forever. In spite of the distractions, dramas, and sideshows in a remarriage with children, your relationship with your husband is the center that holds.