When Jack* and I got together, neither of us were interested in repeating past mistakes. We put everything out on the table pretty early. We listed our dealbreakers up front and what kind of life we wanted. It’s why it worked. We also agreed, in the very early stages, that we wouldn’t be traditional stepparents. It was one family. They were all OUR kids. And that meant being 100% in on every one of them from day one.
The first thing I’ll tell you about that is the most important. Love for your biological children is pretty automatic, in my experience. I grew that kid and loved him before I met him. With your stepchildren, especially in the beginning, don’t expect that automatic unconditional love. It’s a choice you make, over and over again, just like loving your spouse. You are choosing to be family with these people. Importantly – they aren’t given that choice, and you need to remember that, too.
Jack’s older than me by almost a decade. He got married young and had kids young. I went to college and had a touch of young adulthood before I got married and had a child. So by the time we got together, he had one teenager, a preteen and an 8-year-old. My son was 1. I was 28. This is important context. Think about who you were at 28. Were you ready to parent a teenager you just met? You’re going to find out that I have made many, many mistakes. My age isn’t a defense, just context for my readers.
Each of those children has had a different arc to their relationship with me. At different times, each of them has for-real hated me. I’m not talking about the times your kid gets told no and screams, “I hate you!” in a fit. That’s not real hate. Each of my children, including my biological son, have for-real hated me. That wasn’t over in days. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
In the beginning, Pitcher* was so happy to see his dad happy after living through a messy divorce that he went all-in on loving me. He was the first of them to tell me he loved me. He wanted me to be a part of everything when we were dating. Princess* was the opposite. I was taking her daddy away, and she despised me. Prankster* simply thought I was an interesting development – a new person to play with. He neither liked nor disliked me, I was just a shiny new development in his life. And Dude*, my sweet little baby, was just a sweet little baby who may not have been too keen on having to split my attention for the first time in his life.
Spoiler alert: All of those dispositions changed multiple times over the next 20 years. Sometimes I think we’ve lived 100 versions of this family in that time. All of them had good and bad. Some were 99% bad, but none were perfect. The important thing to remember is that we kept choosing each other through it all. That choice wasn’t passive on Jack’s part, or mine, or the kids. Somewhere very early we all somehow accepted that we were in this together.
The important thing to know about the beginning is that we committed to being one family. We committed to choosing to love all of these kids as our kids, and we committed to raising them as one unit. I know that makes it sound like that was easy – as if we decided it and then it was done. That’s misleading. Some days I had to make that decision again hourly. And as time went on, we found all kinds of things that meant that we hadn’t considered. I still think this is the only way a blended family truly thrives.
Before we part ways, I do want to address the elephant in the room. All of these children have another parent (or two) outside of this family. While we decided these are all our children, we also never set out to replace that parent in their lives. There is space for an endless amount of love in life, and we wanted our children to have all of it. The reality is that the other parents have been a complicating factor because that’s just life, but we always wanted our kids to have good relationships with all the parents in their lives.
*I don’t use real names in this blog because I’m sharing very personal stories. That’s my choice, but it may not be theirs.
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