Karinch Maryann - Blending families: merging households with kids 8-18

Blending Families

Blending Families

Merging Households with Kids 818

Trevor Crow Mullineaux and Maryann Karinch

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

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Copyright 2016 by Trevor Crow Mullineaux and Maryann Karinch

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

Names: Crow Mullineaux, Trevor, author. | Karinch, Maryann, author.

Title: Blending families : merging households with kids 8-18 / by Trevor Crow Mullineaux and Maryann Karinch.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015041627 | ISBN 9781442243101 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781442243118 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Stepfamilies.

Classification: LCC HQ759.92.C76 2016 | DDC 306.874/7dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041627

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Disclaimer

The cases described in this book are based on incidents. However, except when otherwise specified, names and specific details have been changed at the request of interviewees who wish to remain anonymous. Therefore, any likeness that might be found with any living individual, except when specified, is unintended.

Contents

TREVOR TALKS ABOUT HER OWN BLENDED FAMILIESPAST AND PRESENT

My dads mother died when he was eleven years old. He was the oldest of four siblings, with the youngest being just two. The family never spoke of it. They were an Irish Catholic brood back in the 1940s when more young mothers than today were dying in childbirth or female diseases. When they left young ones behind, the drill was for the father to find a new mother for his children.

My father, his brother, and two sisters were told to go across the street and stay for a few days. The funeral happened, and after that, they went back home and were told never to speak of it again.

My grandfather remarried, thinking that he was giving his children a loving woman to care for them. She turned out to be mean-spirited.

On his deathbed, my father said that one of the worst things about growing up involved Frank, his step-brother. My fathers stepmother made sure that Frank got his orange juice and a newspaper delivered to his room every morning. For everyone else, the rules were differentall day long.

As an aftermath to this already bad story, Frank ran off with my Uncle Tommys first wife and she took the kids; in other words, he ran off with his step-brothers wife and two children.

This didnt taint my view of blended families, because I didnt even know how awful my fathers life was until after I had a blended family of my own.

I had a few years of the single life after earning my MBA, and then met and married a divorced man with two young children. Abruptly, I went from a self-focused Sex and the City life to an other-focused world of Instant Mom . It also didnt take long until I was both a stepmom and a biological mom. It was at that point I realized something important for every parent who undertakes blending families: As rich, intimate, and wonderful as the bond between a stepparent and child can be, it differs in fundamental animal ways from the relationship with biological children. We can decide to care for, and may even come to love, another persons children, but nature gives us a relationship with our biological children that has nothing to do with decisions. I realized this acutely when my first child was an infant. She smelled like flowers to me; it was a lovely, enticing smell. When I held her and I had a stepchild on my lap at the same time, I was struck by the difference in smell between the two of them! Biology gives us certain triggers so that we want to be near our children. This kind of response has clear advantages for any species since the urge for a mother to stay close to her young helps protect against predators.

It occurred to me when I noticed the difference in smell that, since I wasnt experiencing the biological cues telling me to be close to my stepchildren, I had to make a conscious decision to put myself there. I had to develop a level of sensitivity to their needs because it wasnt coming naturally to me.

For a taste of how our family blendedor at least my husbands two children and our two children came together foreverread the short essay that my biological daughter, Olivia, wrote about her half-sister, Michelle. Its inserted at the end of the chapter on preteens and before the one on teens because Olivia is recalling an event that occurred when she was 10 and Michelle was 16. Michelle and her brother Spencer have been a part of my life throughout my biological childrens lives. Nonstop. No matter what happened between their father and me. When Olivia turned 16 and she was allowed to take one friend on a special trip, the one friend she chose was Michelle.

In marrying Vinnie when my children were 11 and 13, he and I committed to yet another blending adventure. His twelve-year-old daughter, Eva, had been an only child until she moved in with us during the week because she was attending the same school as my daughter and we lived close to it. She would go back to being an only child on the weekends that she spent with her mother, whose home was a much greater distance from the school. So apart from the usual challenges associated with blending, Eva now had to deal with sharing the spotlight with siblings. She brought a great attitude to the process and made it clear that having a sister and brother was a good thing for her.

We could have had a rocky start, though. The day before Vinnie and I were getting married we faced our first test about how these children of ours would feel about each other and about the fairness of our parenting.

When Eva, accompanied by her BFF, was brought to the hotel where the ceremony would take place, she was told that the only room available was a suite. The front desk checked her and her friend into it. Vinnie and I didnt even have a suite! We knew if we let her stay there, it would cause resentment with her new stepsiblings, so she and her friend moved into our room and Vinnie and I took the suite.

The kids saw that he and I stood together on the decision and that we were being fair to everyone. That simple event helped us set the tone for our joint venture as parents/stepparents.

Now that you know a little of my personal experience of hoop-jumping, holding my ground, and celebrating related to the blending process, I want to take you back a generation to the unions of my divorced parents that led to both wonderful and odd outcomes.

In the years Ive been married to Vinnie, and in the years Ive been working with Maryann on books about relationships, neither had ever heard me talk about my stepmother until the spring of 2015. I had not even suggested that I had a stepmother. She was simply the woman who married my father when I was already an adult. We had no connection and since she didnt seem to be present physically or emotionally during my fathers prolonged, fatal illness, she didnt occupy a spot in my thoughts. In some ways, unrelated to my father, she turned out to be rather courageous. I still never thought of her as part of my family, though.