CHAPTER 10

WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?

Whether you are a single parent or part of a blended family, if you are a biological parent you are responsible for raising your own children. This is true in the eyes of every Family Court, in the view of your ex-spouse, your children’s school and most other facets of modern society. You can rationalize all you want, but your child is your child. Whatever ideas, suggestions and critiques you may hear from relatives or your new spouse, the buck starts and stops with you. YOU. You can look around all you want for whatever bailout you think may exist, but rest assured, there is no alternative. If you have children, step up to the plate and do the right thing. Frankly, if your marriage doesn’t work out, the kids will still be your responsibility.

Most of us have grown up in some sort of a family, and that experience influences how we view what a family should be, how we behave when we become parents and our expectations of how our spouse should act. That is why we frequently find ourselves saying, “I can’t believe I’m acting like my father or mother, doing the same stuff I hated as a kid, and here I am doing it to my kids all over again.”

While you think you may be repeating what you always saw as your parents’ mistakes, history shows us that parental roles are always changing. Gender politics, the job market and traditional mores all play a role in influencing our idea of what an ideal parenting situation may be. But anyone who has lived through a divorce realizes that any attempt to automatically graft the old style of parental functions onto a single parent or blended family doesn’t necessarily work. In today’s world, if it’s working, keep it up!

REDEFINING PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY

Following a divorce, a single parent must fill both parental roles, including caretaking, meal preparation and chauffeuring, just to name a few. When your involvement with someone else leads to a new marriage, you open the door to an entirely new set of responsibilities. They may resemble very little of your previous married life. Your new spouse is probably different than your first, to say the least. His or her children are individuals in their own right. Taken together, you have a new family to learn about, with their own ways of doing things. The children are used to things being done a certain way, by both parents or just one, and you, as a new person in their life, can’t possibly know the ins and outs of how they’ve lived. Personalities are not interchangeable and your new spouse and children will have their own ideas and experiences about parenting and family life. Because of that, if you try and recreate things exactly as they were in your previous household with your own children, you’re probably guaranteed to fail. Imagine if your new family sends you grocery shopping with their list of what to get and you decide on your own to buy other things that are the wrong brand, size and flavor. Everyone will be unhappy and you will soon be returning to the store to atone for your sins.

All of this new parental responsibility will be overwhelming if you try and jump in as if you know it all. Conversely, if your new spouse is abruptly thrust into a position of responsibility for your children, you are setting up a situation that cannot reasonably succeed. They can’t ever do everything as well as you, in good part because they don’t have your experience with what happened before, and they don’t have the trust and support of your children.

More importantly, a child who is suddenly told that someone they barely know will be suddenly instrumental in managing their life may become very upset and rebel, either actively or passively, which could drive your new spouse away instead of them becoming more involved and supportive.

One of my patients, struggling herself as a parent in a blended family, put it this way: “I really do not know what I should or could do. My new husband says that I am too indulgent and spoil my son, who he thinks needs to have discipline and consequences for everything he does. But my new husband is also a retired military guy so everything with him is rigid and by the book. My son does need some structure, but he really doesn’t do well with the kind of rigid controls my husband is trying to put on him. He’s a teenager and he doesn’t like being told what to do. He says he hates my new husband.

“I just don’t know what to do. I feel like I have to choose between them, that I can’t win, and that I may lose one of them. He is my son, though. His father really was never there for him, I had to make it up to him, and I am all he has. I really wanted him to have a more positive role model, but this may be too much.”

Marriage, be it your first or last, is a trial and error process. Same with parenting. The most you can hope for is to not make the same mistake twice.

WHEN YOUR SPOUSE’S CHILDREN COME FIRST

A divorce will cause disappointment, loss, anguish and hurt in anyone, but for a child it is more traumatic than almost anything else except the death or catastrophic illness of a parent. Since children usually have not yet developed sufficient coping skills, their emotions may often turn to anger and sometimes rage. Unfortunately, these negative reactions, stemming in large part from a sense of powerlessness, may never be totally resolved. Children can remain hypersensitive to a variety of minor things for many years. While their response to current situations will stir up bad memories of past hurts and frustrations, it often has nothing specific to do with you, but rather with what you represent as a stepparent. But once you’re in the picture, you can become a lightning rod for their feelings. This is more common when you are new in the relationship. Most likely, it will improve over time if you hang in there, tolerate what feels like abuse, and help everyone move through it. The positive thing to remember is that even when you are getting the brunt of a child’s bad reaction simply because you are there, it can also be a result of the child feeling safe enough with you to vent their feelings.

If your stepchildren feel that they have been wronged, they may not feel safe blowing up at the supposed offending biological parent for fear that they will anger the parent and then have to face even worse consequences. When you are the focus of the child’s rage about an event like that, try to recognize it, accept it for the moment, and try not to escalate it. Remember, their anger is often not about you. This is not the time to point out to your stepchildren that you are innocent and that it’s really their biological parent who they’re angry at. That only fuels the fire and puts you at risk of becoming an even bigger bad guy.

Hopefully, your stepchildren will eventually appreciate your patience and best efforts. As they get older, they might be able to discriminate between you, as their stepparent, and the biological parent who hurt them, but that awareness and insight is unlikely to occur during the moment of conflict.

Whenever Barry’s dad broke his promise at the last minute to come by and pick up his son to do something, Barry would feel hurt and become extremely angry. If I happened to be the one around the house, his anger—real or imagined—would focus squarely on me.

Occasionally I would say something like, “I know you’re really mad at your dad because he disappointed you. You’re hurt and angry, and that’s why you’re taking it out on me.”

Ouch! Wrong thing to say. How did I ever pass Psychology 101?

Barry’s response was usually quite direct.

“You’re a butt, George. Don’t use that psychiatry crap on me. I am mad at you because you’re a butt; it’s got nothing to do with anything else.”

As you both start over, remember that your new spouse has been a parent to your stepchildren for a long time, and will continue that role for the duration of all your lives. It is quite possible that your respective parenting strategies were a reason why you were both drawn to each other. That means you cannot get in the middle of the relationship your new spouse and your stepchildren have already built together, nor can you ask your spouse to reshuffle his or her own priorities to make yourself more important. It’s a futile effort, and your spouse will ultimately resent you for it.

In the aftermath of a divorce, parents often feel guilty about breaking up the child’s original biological family. When children are struggling with transitions, they need their parents that much more. Even when parents cannot really do anything to improve the situation, they often feel like they are the best person to be involved. This means you need to be supportive and understanding of your new spouse’s choices, even if it means less adult time together. There is no way that you can demand attention during these circumstances.

The worst dilemma for parents is to feel they must choose between a child and a spouse. This conundrum is heightened when the spouse is new, the child is needy, and the parent feels guilty. This happens in all newly joined families. While it’s important that time be made for you and your new relationship, it is unrealistic to think your spouse can serve both relationships at the same time. Do not make the person you profess to love and care for feel obligated to choose between you and a child. Just be supportive and wait your turn. It should come.

If you feel that in every instance when the two of you are about to spend time together the child precipitates a crisis, pulling his or her biological parent into the middle, you should be able to point that out to your spouse. Be sure though to note that this has been a pattern over time before you jump in, and then make time to discuss the issue and then see if the two of you can’t work out a better way to deal with the attention-seeking child.

When Donna and I got married, I soon realized that when the telephone rang, no matter what we might be talking about, if it was one of the children—whoever’s children—everything else was put on hold and the first order of business was to deal with the child. That is as true when they are twenty-two years old or two. It’s like a fire drill. When the bell goes off, you take care of business, no questions asked.

It boils down to a matter of trust. Children need to learn to trust you as a new parental figure and that simply takes time. Look for little signs of progress, not for immediate, major, and dramatic changes. Recognize that your expectations may be much higher than they should be and that you may be looking for progress to occur sooner than what is realistic.

Whatever issues a child may have, don’t give up on them, and don’t let your spouse, either. Children may not respond on your first, second or even third approach, but keep at it and always keep the door open. Keep working in non-threatening ways to stay in contact and try to maintain upbeat but honest communication. Let their biological parent help the process. Children usually want the connection as much or more than you do, although they may not be able to tell you that initially, or for a significant period of time, after the new marriage.

When the relationship between you and the stepchild begins to improve, which it almost certainly will, you will feel that it has been well worth the effort, even if it took years, not months. As a clinician, it pains me to hear again and again from patients who finally began to get close to their own parent right before their parent’s death that they wished they had started that process much sooner.

Think of it this way: you love your new spouse unconditionally, right? Well, why not take the same approach with the children?

BECOMING A FRIEND AND MENTOR

When children feel anxious, uncertain and somewhat lost in their new family situation, they may set up situations to test you as well as find out where they fit in. Whose side are you on? If you play that game, someone will feel like the loser, and that just can’t happen. Everyone wants to feel special and important, and these little tests are often a way to try and see who is more important to you. Real love has no favorites, and that’s all you really need to remember.

At other times you are asked to decide about a situation, but you clearly can’t be a real judge because you weren’t there or don’t have all the facts, and by the time you are called in to intervene, the facts you get are already mixed up with everyone’s feelings. Try not to be a knee-jerk responder, who always takes the side of one person or the other. If you always support your new spouse and assume your children are always wrong and just causing trouble, they will feel as though they are bad, resent the stepparent, think that you don’t care about them, and your actions will keep the two of them from ever developing a healthy relationship. If you always assume that your child is right and the spouse is at fault, you run the risk of making your spouse feel unimportant and create a situation where there is never genuine fairness and where no problem will ever have a satisfactory resolution.

When Barry would get mad about something, I would usually tell him to chill because he was setting a bad example for our younger kids. That just made him escalate his behavior in front of them, which made me madder. Ultimately, Donna would jump in and help Barry resolve whatever was bothering him. This included telling him that he did need to be a role model for the little kids and that he had to respect me. Later, she would tell me not to provoke him, but she also took my hand and told me that I was right, but that Barry was going through a rough time. It was a tough balancing act for her.

Your children need to know you understand some of what they are going through, and that you will give them the benefit of the doubt when issues arise. Be supportive, even when you know they are wrong, which you can tell them after the heat of the moment has passed. If you are not on their side at least some of the time, who will be?

The first summer Donna and I and our children were all together, we decided to send the two older children together to a two-week camp. As we were getting the car packed up, Frank said he wanted to take his weight lifting set with him. Donna thought that was silly, but it seemed to be important to Frank, so I agreed that he could. I really thought it was a little over the top, and I certainly felt stupid carrying a set of weights and a weight bench up two flights of stairs in a dormitory for a high school kid, but lifting weights to get ready for fall football was a big part of his identity and it was important for him. Looking back, sore back and all, I believe I did the right thing. Yes, even me, and all because I put my children first.