CHAPTER 12

WE’RE HAVING A BABY!

It’s easy, especially in a second marriage with child and household obligations, career responsibilities and community and school connections, to get so caught up in 24/7 living that you take your new marriage—and spouse—for granted. Ideally, you will be with that person for a long, long time, even after the children grow up and leave home. With that in mind you have to make an effort to ensure that your present life is genuinely enjoyable and rewarding enough to get to the “rest of our lives.” It is a little bit like putting money in the bank every day so that it will grow and be there for your retirement. That means taking time out of your normal activities to cultivate that relationship. No matter how demanding everything else may be, including the children, your job, your spouse’s job, and the usual incidentals, you have to make time for your spouse and your relationship. In fact, you should be motivated to do a better job with this spouse and marriage than you did with the last one.

Just as you have to make special time to spend with your own children, you must block out time to spend with your new spouse. Even if your spouse is mature enough to take a step back to let you spend time with your children, you should not expect this of your new significant other all the time. If your spouse does not express any discontent and merely complies with everything you do, this probably isn’t someone you want to be with in the long run anyway. Or, in another case, your spouse may be bottling up all associated emotions and blow up one day. When this happens you will hear all about how selfish, and inconsiderate you are, about how much he or she has done for you in the past couple of months or years without anything in return.

Work to maintain your new marriage on an ongoing and consistent basis. Long after the children have left and do not require constant maintenance, the person you married the second time around will hopefully still be there. It would be nice if you both liked being with each other.

A higher percentage of second marriages end in divorce than first marriages. Among the reasons for this is that many of the spouses feel neglected or shut out when their new spouse is spending too much time with his or her own children and not tending enough to the marriage. Work hard so that does not happen to you. Who knows? If you play your cards right and the stars are aligned in your favor, you and your spouse might choose to create a new family member.

THE DECISION

Many couples decide to expand their relationship by having a child, in effect adding “ours” to “his” and “hers.” It may mean a first child for one of the new spouses, which is always of huge significance. It may be a question of sharing that experience with a loved one, in addition to sharing that spouse’s other kids. It may even be a way to try and cement a relationship that seems fragile and tenuous. That is usually not very effective, and one of the partner’s previous marriages may be more than enough evidence to demonstrate that point.

However, the long-term rewards of adding more children in a blended family are well worth considering. Combining three different batches of children, while difficult, to say the least, can be rewarding in ways unimaginable before they happen. As with everything else in life, problems will occur, whether you expect them or not, but all in all, gauging from my own experience and a multitude of patient evidence, the good vastly outweighs any real notion of bad.

But do not make that decision lightly. Adding another child is a serious, lifelong commitment. Are you about to become freed up from having your other children needing and demanding what seems like all your time and energy on a constant basis? Will a new baby mean curtailing your personal freedom? What about your combined financial resources? I can’t answer these questions for you, but I encourage you to ask all the questions you can in order to be sure you are doing the right thing.

Once you do—jump! There is no perfect time to set out on this new adventure. If you wait until everything is in place, settled, and ready you will either be too old or no longer courageous enough to undertake the effort. Whatever happens, you will be older parents the second time around, the biological clock is usually ticking faster, which means there is pressure to do it sooner rather than later. There may also be anxiety and awareness about your own mortality. The concept of a ticking biological clock can be as worrying for men as it is for women. Nursery schools, and parks are full of middle-aged fathers who joke to each other about using their Medicare cards to get senior discount tickets at their kids’ Little League games or ballet recitals. But those fathers are also one of the happier clubs in town.

If you thought getting married again was your biggest decision in life, wait until you are facing the prospect of having a new child with a new spouse!

PREPARING A NEW SET OF SIBLINGS

While you worry about those issues, your children, who may have just started to get comfortable about where they fit in with the new family, will be anxious about what their place will be in a new hierarchy that will include an additional child. They may have felt that they had some clout and tenure with you, their biological parent, but what will happen when you have two sets of children? Will you be pulled in two different directions, leaving your original children to observe the novelty of the new baby? And, what about the stepparent, who may have been nice to them before? Without a lifelong attachment, why would that person even care about them when another child comes into the picture? The scenario of a new child entering the family can be exciting, but it can also reignite ingrained fears of abandonment initially triggered by your divorce.

Once you and your spouse have decided to add a new child, you have to bring up the subject to your current children. Depending on their ages, their reactions will vary from being ecstatic about having a new toy to play with to being resentful that they will get an even smaller piece of their biological parent than they had before. Not to mention that they may have to give up their room and share with a sibling.

Almost no one automatically welcomes change of any sort, and this will be seen as a major change. Just because they are not ecstatic about the idea of a new addition when they first hear about it, it does not mean you should not go through with your plan. It does mean, though, that after a short time you should bring it up again, tell them that you really appreciate their input, and will want their help but basically have decided to do it anyway. After all, it is your life, and you and your new spouse will be together with the new additions long after the first batch of children leave home, although you should try to make the idea more tolerable for them from the start.

When Donna and I married, I went into it already knowing I wanted to have more children. Following my divorce, I had spent ten years commuting monthly between Texas and California in order to be with my son. I made sure that I saw at least one game per season in soccer and football, that I didn’t miss his spelling bee finals, plays or every other significant date on his calendar. Each time I traveled west, from the time he was eight until he graduated high school at eighteen, I spent a couple of days in yet another hotel room, knowing no one else in the city except my son. In between visits, I planned what to do on the next one, always feeling as if I was trying to package a month’s worth of parenting into two sacred days. In retrospect, we did plenty of fun things, but for ten years I always had the nagging feeling that I was really missing out on what parenting was all about, simply because I wasn’t consistently there. I was left romanticizing about what living with and raising my own child full-time would really be like.

My desire to have more children influenced who I dated, which meant excluding people that I am sure were wonderful, and with whom I might have gotten involved had we not had a fundamental disagreement about our future. Throughout this entire time, I never wavered in my desire to have another child. Donna was happy with the two kids she had, but the idea eventually grew on her.

Looking back, we can both agree that having more kids on top of the ones we already had was more work than we bargained for and we were exhausted a great deal of the time. Donna felt like no one was happy with what she was doing, despite the fact that she was taking care of everybody. The more she tried to do, the more everyone complained and seemed to feel neglected. When Donna went to see a psychiatrist (not me!) he joked with her, but his words were telling.

“The problem is that your breasts aren’t big enough. You just don’t have enough milk for everyone.” Metaphorically speaking, he might have been right, despite the fact that at the time three of our children were teenagers.

But all along, Donna and I never felt that we were not living in a loving environment or doubted that we would find a way through. And now, I wouldn’t have given up any of it or any one of them. Love goes a long, long way when it’s genuine.

BONDING VS. BABYSITTING

The first reaction that all children have when they learn that their family is going to add a new child is to get very excited. The next reaction, even when they are living with both biological parents is usually anxiety, fear, and jealousy, driven by the questions, which are also asked by children in non-divorced families:

“What will happen to me?”

“What did I do wrong so that they want to add someone else?”

“I wasn’t good enough so they have to add someone else.”

“If I was good enough or if they were happy enough with me, they wouldn’t want to add another child.”

These reactions typify children who are aware that all the attention that used to be focused on them and that they now share in a blended family will soon be directed to someone they did not invite, and most probably did not want. While this feeling of being displaced and abandoned is an issue for all children, in a blended family the children are already sensitized to the focus on them being interrupted, and the feeling that they are not as important to their biological parents as they once had been. This means that the traditional “what’s wrong with me” questions which arise with a new baby are made even worse by the child’s post-divorce experience of actual abandonment.

There is no simple solution to their fear, anxiety, and concerns. The best thing you can do is to constantly reassure them that they are important, that you love them, that they are part of the new family, and that you need their help to make it all work. Your children and stepchildren also need to know that your decision to have another child is not about them, but rather that you want to share the love you have for them with a new child. Over time, if you repeat it enough, the message should sink in.

The effect of a new child will be obvious on the children who are living in the home, but it also has an effect on the children who just come to visit at prearranged times and are not permanent residents. All of them should be privy to what is going on, how things are progressing, and how you think life will be for everyone after the baby arrives. They should be reassured again and again that a new child is not a negative reflection on them, or an indication that they will be replaced. At least one of their own parents is also the biological parent of the new child, and they may have concerns about their parent’s health as well as the health of the baby. This is particularly true in regards to the health of the mother, whether she is their own biological mother or not. Having been surprised by the divorce and the way it affected them, the children will also be concerned about how another child might destabilize their lives.

Helping to prepare your children and stepchildren for a new sibling is not unlike what you did when you were preparing them for the new marriage. Allow them to pick out things for the new baby’s room and let them share your excitement as the process moves forward. Make sure they get to see the sonograms and let them feel the baby’s kicks. Let everyone be involved in picking a name. Make it a team effort.

When Donna first found out the sex of the baby, she was very excited, and told all the kids. At first, I asked not to be told because I didn’t know the sex of my first child and I didn’t want to know about this one, either. Her kids were so excited that they told their own dad, so everyone knew but me. At that point, I realized that if her ex-husband knew the sex of my new child, I should too, so I gave in and they told me.

Your first children need to feel part of this new family, and that they are related to and connected to their new sibling. This is really best done if the children are involved with the baby as soon as possible. Take them to the hospital when the baby comes. Let them play with the new baby or help you bottle feed the new child. Eventually your older children will bond with their new brother or sister. When you go home, you can further this process by having them help you with activities that involve the baby, whether it is preparing food, feeding, playing, or even pushing the stroller.

When our first baby was born, the other children got really excited and enjoyed playing with him and watching him do things. They both quickly felt like they were partially responsible for him turning out okay.

But partially is as far as it should go. You and your spouse wanted a new child, not your children. They just happen to be living with you, are dependent on you and are trying to survive as best they can, given everything that has already happened in their life. Why should they have to take care of your new children because you decided to further complicate their life? Do not make them take care of your new children so that you can do other things, even if those things seem important to you or to the family in general. Ask them if they would like to help out, but give them the choice. Offer to pay them to babysit or to help out if you need them to. This way, they are treated in the same manner as a paid nanny or babysitter from the outside, which you would have to look into hiring anyway if they were not around. That gives the older children a choice, rather than pushing them into doing something they may not want to do, or making them feel obligated to do something that interferes with their own schedule. By giving them the choice of being involved, for pay or not, you reinforce for them that they are individuals with their own priorities and life and that they are as important to you as the new baby is. They may want to do it anyway and volunteer but that is different than making it a requirement. If they feel compelled to babysit or care for their new sibling, they may grow resentful of the baby and feel that this child is in the family at their expense.

One evening at the last minute, Donna and I wanted to go to a party. It was too late to call one of our usual babysitters. Instead we asked, i.e. told, our older kids to babysit. They became angry, then resentful.

“We already have plans, why do we have to change them to babysit?”

After pushing them some more to help out, we realized they were right. The new babies were our children, not theirs. They had plans, which were just as important to them as ours were to us. Donna and I realized that if we couldn’t plan ahead, regardless of whether we offered to pay them or not, we, not our kids, should have to deal with the consequences.

We stayed home that night, like many, many others. Years later, I don’t remember what the party was even about or who was hosting it, but I’m sure I can remember spending a wonderful evening at home with the family I loved.