Ladies: Wednesday Martin, the author of Stepmonster is looking for stepmoms to interview. Here is her request and contact info:
“If you are a woman with stepchildren who has experienced physical violence in your household at the hands of your stepchild or adult stepchild, or know someone who is, I would like to hear from you for research purposes. I also encourage you to find support so that you can feel and be safe in your home. My email address is wednesday@wednesdaymartin.com.”
Check out my latest Stepmom Circles podcast. This week I lead you through a guided meditation about what you desire for the future of your stepfamily. You’ll need a pen, notebook, and time to yourself. Have fun!
Join the Stepmom Circles group on FaceBook to discuss the show!
There are few things more dangerous to a stepmom’s mental health than a loud and damning Inner Critic. I don’t know about you but sometimes all the “shoulds” about how I’m “supposed” to be that I beat myself up with are enough to drive a good woman to drink. According to the voice inside my head I’m supposed to be more maternal to my stepkids, nicer, more bonded with them. I’m supposed to have a cleaner house and a better relationship with my husband’s ex. I’m not supposed to get tired, be jealous or angry. I’m certainly not supposed to snap at my stepkids because I am supposed to make this family work!
Sometimes I really need to tell that Inner Critic to shut the hell up. Know what I mean? I’ve written several pieces for this blog on the art of smacking down the Inner Critic. You can check them out by clicking on the S.M.A.C.K.s for Stepmoms category on the right hand side of this page. I’ve also written a new book with a friend of mine called S.M.A.C.K. Your Inner Critic: Knock out your doubt and live the life of your dreams.My agent sent it out to publishers on Friday! So I have a favor to ask, m’ladies! Please visit our blog at www.smackyourinnercritic.comand if you feel called to make a comment on one of our posts, I’d be deeply grateful! Drop me a line at becomingastepmom (at) gmail.com to let me know you commented and I’ll send a free, signed copy of my book A Career Girl’s Guide to Becoming a Stepmom to the person who writes the 25th comment we get starting now! Many, many thanks!
Very exciting news! Brenda Ockun the publisher of Stepmom Magazine will be featured on Good Morning America tomorrow! Wahoo! The camera crew will be taping Brenda, her family, and the ex. Tune in Friday morning at 8 a.m. on ABC. Congrats Brenda!
Emily Bouchard, founder of www.blended-families.com, is an expert in stepfamily issues with more than 20 years of experience in working with children and families dealing with adversity. She has a master’s degree in social work and a bachelor’s degree in child development. Emily is also a stepdaughter and a loving stepmother to two young women who were teenagers when she entered their lives. At www.blended-families.comyou will find archived articles such as this one, a free newsletter written by professional family coaches, and many other resources for stepmoms who want to thrive in their families.
A New Perspective on Dealing with Your Husband’s “Ex”
By Emily Bouchard
One of the most persistent and common complaints I hear from stepmoms is their frustration with their husbands’ former spouses whose behavior is intolerable.
In my experience it is HOPELESS to wish, want, need, hope, pray – that THEY will change. I’ve heard clients report how they have tried all sorts of communication strategies that are supposed to be so effective with zero results. I’ve heard so many complaints about how the former spouse will agree to something and then turn around and do the opposite – and my clients are always so surprised EVERY time this happens.
I feel a need to repeat here Gertrude Stein’s definition of insanity that can be very helpful: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Here’s what I tell couples who are struggling with these issues – stop focusing on what is wrong about the “ex” and start focusing on what you do have control over – your responses to what the ex-spouse does in relationship to you and your family.
Oftentimes, when couples begin to shift their focus, they discover that it has been serving them to look outside themselves at what is so wrong about the other person – the one they cannot change. It allows them to feel victimized, helpless, hopeless, and righteously indignant. They get to feel superior, knowing better than the former spouse how to parent and deal with new families and new lives.
The remarkable paradox that occurs is that when couples shift to:
change does occur – it has to. When one aspect of the family “system” changes, all members have to shift as well.
When the new, second wife is able to release and let go of her resentments toward the former wife, she is able to be much more at peace with whatever the ex-wife is doing. By becoming a “lover of reality,” you get to actually enjoy the drama of life, instead of feeling only wronged, victimized, and hurt by life.
Freedom and peace come from meeting life fully with what it brings you instead of wishing, hoping, or needing life to be different than what it is.
Action Step: The next time a former spouse pushes your buttons and you feel frustrated, angry, or hurt -
This same process works for ANYTHING outside of your control in your life. Any time you feel out of balance, frustrated, angry, or irritated about a situation – be it about one of your stepchildren, the weather, your computer not working right, your partner, etc. – you can apply this simple strategy to determine, consciously, how you’d like to respond to what life brings you.
Guest blogger Cynthia D. Rudick, Ph.D., has been counseling stepfamilies in her private practice for 20 years. She’s a professional mediator and arbitrator in Canton, Ohio, who is also an adjunct professor in graduate counseling programs. For the past 16 years she’s been stepmother of two, now ages 23 and 28. She lives with her husband and two yellow labs. Contact her at 330-492-2941 or email her.
Bonding or Bondage in Stepfamilies: The Choice is Yours
One of the hardest challenges for stepmothers and women in general is to balance their needs with everyone else’s. We are taught from birth to care for others and feel guilty if we think about ourselves. Raising children is a full-time commitment. Raising stepchildren is an overtime commitment. The challenges are huge, the rewards are not immediate, and the conflict can be intense.
Perhaps the most difficult time to enter a child’s life is during their teens. If we are a good parent, we have a need to connect and nurture. Yet this child is experiencing a need to separate, a need to resist what is and find out who he or she is. Developmentally, we are on two different planets. Many battles and deep wounds can follow.
One of the only ways I can justify the slings and arrows of life is to be aware of my transcendent purpose. What I mean is to think about the lessons in this experience that are personal and dynamic for me in a spiritual sense.
Our expectations keep us in resistance to situations we encounter in the reality of our lives. Reality is occurring, but we think it should be different. Our peace of mind or lack of it is measured in the space between reality and our expectations.
Stepmothers are idealistic people. We believe we can create a family where there was already one. Idealistic people have a big space between their expectations and reality. Pain is the result of the distance we feel in the space between how things are and how things should be. We need to work on our growth as individuals instead of trying to get someone else to change.
Our childhoods mark us and we have ideas of ourselves formed early in life – what kind of person we have to be, how we think life should be, how we think others should be. We need to work on our core issues and our own growth if we are to stay married. Women who have done this deep work have developed good relationships over time with their stepchildren. I define a good relationship as an honest one. And we cannot be any clearer with others than we are with ourselves.
Again, it takes so much time to form a family where there already was one. For example, women often enter a family and then things hit the fan when the stepchild becomes a teenager. The child resists the rules in the stepmother and dad’s home because the birth mother requires no rules. Thus, chaos ensues. The child threatens to go live with their mother. Stepmothers need to hold to the high ground and not be deterred by terrorist threats.
Setting an Example is the High Road
I think we model who we are and how we live by example. This is a much more powerful message than all the words we use. Later in life, when the immature teenager develops beyond the lacks of the birth parent they are tied to, they will understand the guard rail you tried to provide for them. Be proud of your mission here. It may be singular but it is a powerful assignment. Children need to learn these living skills from you even though they may offer extreme resistance.
Model Your Own Virtue in the Face of Powerlessness
Again, it is not so much what we say but who we are that provides such a powerful model for others. Believe in yourself. Teach by example. Yelling and fighting just increase your lack of power. In fact, the louder you yell, the more powerless you feel, and vice versa.
Patience is a Virtue in the Face of Powerlessness
Sometimes our timing is off. We want things to happen now. We want things to change now. These patterns in ourselves and others are firmly planted and it takes time and energy to shake them up.
Don’t Take It Personally Even Though It May Be Hurtful
It takes a long time to build trust. Stepchildren have been hurt by broken relationships and promises. Sometimes the person they lash out at is us – because we are there and we are safe. This is a very backhanded compliment. Behavior can be hurtful, even though it is not personal. Try to find a way to process your feelings. Try to find a method to detach from others’ projections when you have done little to cause the anger. Talk to yourself. Talk to others. Take a walk. Scream. Cry.
Journal, Journal, Journal
One of the safest most private ways to vent emotions is on the pages of a journal. This is a great tool for healing. Also, with enough unexpurgated, unedited journal writing, you will begin to see patterns in your life that you need to change.
Do Some Deep Core Work
Do some mining into your inner recesses with a trained professional. There’s a stigma about going to therapy. I see myself as a coach. We are Americans and we want a quick fix. But to really change, we need to work in the deep end of the pool. Some self-help programs and books only put “whipped cream on poop” and the original problems still smell. I encourage you to do the deep work necessary on your inner life. We change from the inside out. It will pay off in the end. And you are worth it.
Thanks to Diane Fromme, the author of Stepparenting the Grieving Child, for asking me to be a guest blogger at Mama J’s Parenting Posts. Here’s an excerpt from the post I wrote, “Compassion Beats Competition” about the tough relationship between stepmothers and stepdaughters.
“Studies show that girls often exhibit more anxiety than boys do after a remarriage. This is an important fact for stepparents to keep in mind. While conducting interviews of stepmoms across the country, I was told more than once that stepmothers were concerned that instead of bonding over shared interests with their stepdaughters, they were in a competition for Dad’s attention and affection.”
If you’ve got stepdaughters, check out the rest of the post at Diane’s blog.
Susan D. Stewart is a sociologist at Iowa State University and the author of Brave New Stepfamilies. The is part two of our interview.
How do you conduct your research?
My research involves secondary data analysis. So these days there are numerous nationally representative data sets of children and families that contain all kinds of information about family living arrangements, measures of well-being for children and adults, depression, juvenile delinquency, and academic achievement. It costs millions of dollars to put those together so it’s very high-quality data. My research has mostly been analyzing data and looking for patterns. I’ve done a lot of work on non-resident parents-parents without custody of their kids-visitation patterns, and child support. Now I’m contemplating collecting my own data because I’ve found that states are mandating joint custody. They have just passed a law in Iowa that assumes joint custody and so what this means is that if a couple gets divorced it means if both spouses want custody of their child then they get shared custody. In other words you would have to prove that your spouse is mentally ill or a drug addict or abusive in court. It used to be the courts were much more in favor of one spouse getting custody and the other having visiting rights. I think a lot of this is motivated by the men’s movements with Alec Baldwin leading the charge. Conservative men who are feeling like they don’t have control over their children and their families. The worry is that men will choose shared custody to get out of paying child support. I get no child support even though I only make two-thirds of what my ex-husband makes because apparently judges don’t like to quibble over small amounts. It’s a worrisome trend.
Why this relates to my research is because most of the national data sets are based on this model of custodial parent, non-custodial parent. Parents today are increasingly both custodial and non-custodial. One weekend a resident parent, the next weekend a non-resident parent because we switch back and forth every week. I think it’s horrible. I hate it. I don’t think it’s good for my child. The effects of it are not known. Any studies that have been conducted on joint custody have shown that kids do better than kids raised by single parents. Yes, but a decade or two ago, the kids in joint custody were a very select group of children. The parents got a long and chose this and cooperated. But this is now being forced on people. I had no choice. My ex-husband wanted to have custody of our daughter too, and he is not so flawed that anybody would say no. I think more and more states are moving toward this model. And it’s good in some ways. It’s not good for kids to not be involved with their dad. But I’m not sure for the general population that this should be mandated. I don’t know what the effects are going to be.
And so I want to study this and it would involve collecting my own data because the studies out there right now either put children in categories of resident, non-resident in situations where it’s really much more of a shared arrangement. We just don’t have the numbers to accurately study. That’s what I’m working on. Of course, it’s partly motivated by my own experience.
These non-traditional family structures are here to stay. What do you think stepfamilies, cohabitating couples with kids, and gay and lesbian couples need in order to be successful?
Trying to fit yourself into the traditional model never works. I think the biggest mistake new stepparents make is to try to operate as a traditional parent. Usually what happens is, especially with discipline, they do the discipline before the relationship has really developed. And so that sets up a bad dynamic because you need the love, the emotional connection in order for the child to respect the discipline and monitoring by the stepparent. I feel like there should be more of a backing off for everybody. Be patient and allow time for relationships to develop.
When I was contemplating getting remarried, he became way too involved with my daughter too soon and then the relationship didn’t work out. And stepfamilies do have higher rates of dissolution than traditional families. Then we are left with a child who says, “Where is the stepdad?” Well it didn’t work out. But really it was not even a year relationship. I do think that a big problem is we have the Dr. Laura view on divorce, which is people who get divorced should be punished which means they should not be dating. You should be in this self-imposed exile for your sins. You’re never supposed to bring your child around any partners. You’re never supposed to have your boyfriends or girlfriends sleep over. Basically you’re supposed to live like a monk for the next two years, which is how long people think it takes get through a divorce. I don’t agree with that. I think people move in and out of children’s lives a lot. They make new friends. So it’s not that you shouldn’t have new people in their lives, but just don’t get them too involved too soon.
And the stepparent should not get too involved. I think a lot of men do this. They want to take care of a woman and her children and be the head of household, be the disciplinarian. That’s how men are trained to be, and I think that can be bad especially if the children are really involved with their dad. For stepmoms, I think the biggest mistake there is that women are more in charge of taking care of children in the house and they put the new stepmom in that role unfairly so she is stuck with a lot of yucky routine jobs taking care of the house and the children. When that relationship should also be given time to develop. I think stepmoms have it particularly bad. I said this in my book-it’s the hardest role in a stepfamily because you have all the pressures of being a mom and all the scrutiny of being a stepmom on top of that without any of the support. So you are thrust into this role and you may not have even wanted it. You may have no experience with children, but everyone expects you to be this instantly fabulous mother.
I also think the finances should be talked about ahead. All of this should be talked about. There is one older study that shows a very tiny proportion of remarried couples actually talk about these things before they get married. They think it will all work out. I think people should talk. How are you going to manage the money? How will decisions be made? Set up some scenarios and see how you would respond and what your partner thinks of that. It’s not very romantic, but it’s a good idea.
What about the biological parents? What advice would you give them?
For women who are the biological parent in the stepfamily I think it’s easy to give up control over your own kids. And I would caution women to not do that. And same thing with biological dads. I would encourage a co-parent relationship between both biological parents. There has to be an acknowledgement that increasingly there’s going to be more of a role of the non-resident parent. And it’s better if everyone can communicate and get along. It’s asking a lot, certainly, but for the kids…I am very mixed about it. I’m a sociologist and parenting is socially constructed so you don’t necessarily have to be a biological parent to be a good parent. But because these relationships are so knew I think the biological parents are really the ones who know their child the best. Whether that’s because they are biologically related or they’ve just spent the most time with their kids. Don’t try to be an instant family. Accept who you are. And that these children are going to grow up with multiple parents which can be really good. What can be better for kids than to have more adults invested and paying attention to them as opposed to less?
In the book Between Two Worlds, author Elizabeth Marquardt talks about how children are stuck in the middle of their biological parents. And sometimes exes don’t realize the negativity they are passing along to their children. What do you think about that?
I felt really bad today because my husband and I went to a parent-teacher conference where it was revealed that my child doesn’t seem as happy go lucky as the other kids. She’s nervous and sort of lashes out if people want to interrupt her game playing. She gets very anxious about her clothes and weird stuff like that. And as I was sitting there with my ex-husband it wasn’t going well. He was doing a lot of stuff and I was doing a lot of stuff that was really just about us. We probably looked awful to this teacher. She was really good. She said, “I always ask myself, would I be this concerned if the child had two parents who were married or is it that I know that she has to go back and forth between two parents and am I making these issues out to be more than they really are?” It’s really hard. I know better. And my ex-husband should know better. But at the same you have to be careful to not attribute all of your kid’s behaviors to the fact that she’s coming from a broken home. That’s a big mistake. Kids have their personalities. I am a nervous person by nature. So is my ex-husband. Maybe that’s just my daughter’s personality.
I always bring up this point, too. When you look at our European counterparts in Sweden and France and Germany where they have much more family diversity, if you look at the measurements of well-being over there they do much better than us. Kids raised in Sweden, for example, chances are their parents weren’t married when they were born. Most of the parents in Sweden are co-habitating when they have their first baby and divorce rates are extremely high. Denmark has one of the highest divorce rates in the world, but if you look at all the indicators for children’s well-being, they are doing better than us academically, they have less delinquency, they have lower infant mortality. Pretty much any measure of children’s well-being, they do better than us. I think it has to do with the fact that there is a lot more support there for family diversity.
In Sweden, co-habitating couples receive the same benefits from the government as married couples. There’s national healthcare. There’s paid maternity leave for husbands and wives. There’s subsidized preschool. There’s so much more help for families. In the U.S. you’re just on your own. We consider raising families a very private matter in the United States and it’s a terrible thing. You’ve somehow failed if your children don’t turn out. You have not done your job. We have less support than pretty much any other country like us. I think for people raised in non-traditional families it’s even worse. It’s really a mistake to blame family breakdown for the problems that children have. It’s one of many factors, but maybe if we looked at families differently, took a more broad approach, then we wouldn’t have so many issues with this.
When I talk to stepfamilies it’s easy to see that the whole idea of not feeling supported really affects their self-worth.
Yes. You pass that anxiety along to your kids. You might be a more permissive parent because you feel so guilty, but that’s not good for kids. Or you might go the other way and you worry about how your child is going to be perceived. I think the guilt factor is absolutely huge. And then parents not feeling self-worth pass it down to their kids. My ex-husband thinks that divorce is the worse thing in the world. That it is the greatest tragedy. Well of course our daughter internalizes that. He believes there could be nothing worse than having divorced parents, which I don’t believe. There are many things that are negative in life and this is one. I wouldn’t call it a positive thing necessarily unless there’s a lot of conflict there. The huge weight people put on intact marriage I think is really displaced.
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