Names and identifications in the case examples have been changed.
Shaping a family with children and adults from previous families is a bit like building a car out of spare parts, only harder. It can be done, but not without a great deal of persistence, creativity, and help. The following article illustrates the obstacles and gives steps couples can take to overcome them.
Mark and Rita Cunningham, both divorcees living in Portland, Oregon, married eight years ago. Between them, they had seven children to think about: she a tenth grader, he a ninth grader, she an eighth grader, he a seventh grader, she a fourth grader, he a third grader, and she a pre-schooler. Mark is an aw-shucks kind of man who loves children and, according to Rita, “could have four blended families and it wouldn’t bother him.”
When he was divorced, his son, Paul, was a freshman in high school, just starting to play football, and very close to his father. So Paul came along with Mark, while the mother kept custody of the two daughters. Mark and Rita, then, became full-time parents to five children and Mark a part-time father to two. With his live-and-let-live attitude and his joy at having custody of Paul, Mark paid an unusual amount of attention to the boy and seemed to expect Rita to do the same.
“I thought Mark was afraid,” Rita says, “that he’d leave and go to his mother. And I was afraid to get mad at Paul because if it came down to it, Mark might choose him over me. I guess I was still insecure from my divorce. I was walking on eggshells.”
Rita’s first husband, by contrast, had virtually ignored the children and now saw them only at Christmas. He sent $100 a month per child, the amount ordered by the court, but did nothing further. Rita had seen in Mark someone who cared for his family, who would take care of the children. She didn’t count on his caring quite so much. For years, he talked to his ex-wife frequently, wanting to know exactly what his daughters were doing. He bought the girls their first cars and sent them to college. Understandably, the ex-wife remained dependent on Mark in many ways.
“She was having problems with her family,” Mark says, “going through lawsuits over money, and I’d just sort of half-listen, not really wanting to know. Then I’d hang up and forget about it.” Mark couldn’t understand why all this bothered Rita, because when she talked to her ex-husband—rarely and perfunctorily—it didn’t bother him at all.
The girls came to visit more often than Rita expected. She got along with them fairly well—although the eldest made her feel uncomfortable because she looked arid talked exactly like her mother—but there were too many people around. Too many doors banging, too many people to fix dinner for, too many children to worry about treating sensitively and fairly. And not enough time by herself or with her husband. Rita felt as if she were at the end of her rope.
Family relationships have become more complicated, not less, through the years. Rita’s ex-husband got angry one Christmas because she hadn’t sent gifts with the children for his new wife’s parents. Even ex-grandparents expect to be visited and written to. Once Rita got a call from her husband’s ex-wife’s second husband.
“Blended families” is the term for such households, and it is frequently a euphemism. The Cunninghams and others like them know that The Brady Bunch hardly tells the whole story of life in a yourkids/my-kids household. Regluing the shards from former fractures into a new composite is not only painstaking but often painful as well.
One pastor who finds more and more people asking for glue these days is Jim Smith, director of family life development at Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas. “This is a city with one of the highest divorce rates in the nation,” he says. “It’s easier to get out of a marriage in Dallas than to get out of Book of the Month Club.”
Eight years ago, when he first came to the 8,000member church, Smith set up a premarital counseling program. He strongly believed the church should not contribute to the divorce rate by marrying couples who were unprepared for marital responsibilities.
But as the program progressed, Smith realized that partners who had previously been married had different and far more complex needs than young people marrying for the first time. Spouses with children were asking their new, previously unmarried partners to become “instant parents.” When both spouses brought children into the marriage, a host of difficulties cropped up. Three years ago, Smith designed a second premarital counseling program for people like the Cunninghams.
Many churches have been reluctant to help remarrying couples, Smith says, because “to counsel divorcees who plan to marry makes it appear that we condone divorce. That’s not necessarily so. First, I always tell people I believe divorce is failure and it needs to be faced as failure. In the sense that it is not living up to God’s plan, his model of husband and wife, it’s sin.
“But given that people are remarrying, and that 40 percent of all second marriages fail in the first four years, the question becomes: Does the church have a responsibility to help people who are determined to remarry in developing secure second marriages?”
Jim Smith’s resounding yes has made him one of the most popular family counselors in Dallas. The waiting list at Highland Park is so long that in January the church will begin a full-fledged counseling center, open to the public as well as parishioners.
Because of Smith’s expertise, Highland Park attracts more than its share of blended families. But such families are not unique to Dallas, if his numerous invitations to speak in churches across the country are any measure. Eventually, Smith says, nontraditional or blended families will outnumber nuclear families in our society.
Yet, the blended family has received little attention even in the literature on counseling. (Exceptions are Suzy Kalter’s Instant Parent, published by Berkley, and Emily and John Vischer’s Step Families, from Brunner Mazel.) Until recently, most people were trying to tailor the new types of families to the model of the nuclear family. It didn’t work.
“Every problem in a nuclear family undergoes a 100-fold multiplication in the blended family,” Smith says. In addition to the marital adjustments that every couple goes through, old and new family ties—children, in-laws, relatives, and friends—create another set of responsibilities to shoulder and issues to negotiate.
Smith’s first step in counseling is to diagram the engaged couple’s old and new family relationships on paper. He shows how complicated the personal dynamics are going to be. Indeed, the potential variety in the relationships within a blended family are astounding. Consider the possible cases for each spouse: the individual may not have been married before; may be divorced; may be divorced without custody of children, with custody of some but not all, or with complete custody; and may have been divorced several times with a different arrangement in each case. Now multiply these cases by two.
Just drawing a diagram of the contemplated family structure revises many couples’ opinions of their future problems.
“The whole task of premarital counseling is to knock any illusions in the head,” says Smith. “I try to be brutally frank. I feel that’s a part of my pastoral duty.”
When one or both partners have been divorced, the second step is to review the impact of the divorce(s) on the couple. Smith sees four basic sub-relationships in each marriage: the husband/wife relationship, the lover relationship, the managerial relationship, and the parenting relationship. “The thing most couples do not realize is that divorce does not sever the last,” Smith says. Because parents continue to interact with their children, it is especially important that the raw emotional edges between the former husband and wife be finished off. “If they have not dealt with forgiveness and put the first marriage behind them, they’ll often use relationships with their children to hurt their former spouse. This creates additional burdens for the new marriage as well.”
Next, Smith discusses the role each partner will play and the expectations associated with it. Certain roles present peculiar problems.
For example, the woman who comes into a marriage that includes her new husband’s children has to overcome the “wicked stepmother” myth. With Cinderella in the back of her mind, she often tries so hard not to be a wicked stepmother that she ends up being one. She attempts the impossible task of being the supermom who brings everyone together and gets everyone to love each other overnight.
This “instant parent” usually meets stubborn resistance from the children. Suddenly overtaken by the inexplicable calamity of their parents’ divorce, they may assume that the cleavage was their fault and try in every way to get Mom and Dad back together, including sabotaging the new marriage. They may also act out of fear that the new family system will not have enough love to go around. Because of the pressure brought on by divided loyalties, their characters may change drastically.
Smith tells about working with one woman who, after a number of years in her career, married a man whose wife had died, leaving four children. Things did not exactly go like The Sound of Music. The problems started on the night back from their honeymoon, when a son walked into their bedroom to get something, without knocking or excusing himself. He did it again fifteen minutes later.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” she whispered in disbelief.
“I don’t know what to say,” her husband answered. He eventually agreed to put a lock on the bedroom door, which only brought accusations from the kids that they were being locked out of their dad’s life.
For years the woman had fended for herself and eaten on the run; now suddenly she was expected to cook three large meals a day, seven days a week. Finally she reminded her husband, “Even a maid gets a day off,” and he agreed that Sunday would be restaurant day.
It soon became apparent that the children had ordered their mother around unhindered. The new woman in the house did not take kindly to such treatment but had difficulty convincing her husband that things ought to change. “It was as if he was saying, ‘I love you, but I can’t come out and fight for you.’ “
The marriage tottered for several months before counseling intervened. Now the wife is working on standing up for herself instead of waiting for outside defense. “I went through a phase of blaming myself for getting into such a complicated situation,” she says. “God is so great, however, he can even make mistakes work for good.”
Just as a woman must contend with the image of the wicked stepmother, a man, according to Smith, is often looked upon as a rescuer. Many women descend two steps on the social and financial ladder when they divorce (e.g., if they are upper-middleclass, they become lower-middle-class). After remarrying and being restored to her former status, a woman may abdicate any responsibility for the family, letting the full weight of keeping it together fall on her husband. He must confront her about what she is doing and demand that she do her part.
In his counseling, Smith also emphasizes the need for couples to take time together, to escape for weekends alone and make the relationship “real solid real quick.” As we have seen, this is anything but easy when there are children around. But, “if the couple gets bonded well, they can usually survive the kids’ attacks on the marriage. The Bible places its emphasis on the relationship of the husband and wife and sees the happiness of the children as dependent upon the stability of the parents’ love for each other. The primary focus in any marriage has to be the relationship of the couple.”
Jack and Diane Halvorsen, with the help of Smith and others, have built a solid second marriage. They both brought children into the marriage, since Jack’s wife was an alcoholic. Diane, a good mother, was naturally awarded custody of her children. The Halvorsens have encountered similar problems to those in the other case studies and worked through them.
They cite the weekends away from their children as a key to the success of the marriage. Hour after hour on these weekends, they talked about the problems, working out solutions they could both live with when they got back to the house. They tried their best never to let one parent go it alone in raising and disciplining the children.
Still, there were many problems. The watershed of the relationship came when they understood that each would never love the other’s children in the way he loved his own. Diane says, “I was naive. I thought I should immediately love his children and vice versa. When I finally could look at him and say, ‘I will never love your children like I love mine, and you will never love my children like you love your own—now where do we go?’ then we knew we would be OK. It’s terribly hard getting there, though.”
They both view their divorces as the lesser of evils. They have each given up leadership roles in the church on the basis that divorce disqualifies them. Jack says, “Certainly the New Testament teaches that a deacon should be married only once, and I’m for that. But when I look at the Bible and see the number of people whose lives were similar to mine—David, and so many others in the Old and New Testaments—people who failed, messed up, and did all the bad things human beings can do, then I’m confident of having been forgiven.”
Each blended family is different and has its own set of problems, many of them totally different than in the nuclear family. Every pastor certainly does not have the gift of counseling, especially for such complex situations, but Smith recommends the following strategies for anyone:
(1) Get the resource books and give them to the people involved. Sometimes just having the problems articulated and knowing that other people have them can ease tensions.
(2) Bring people in similar circumstances together and let them talk and learn from each other.
(3) Take in a seminar on the subject, and try to understand the grief involved in divorce and the forgiveness needed by the couple whose marriage has failed.
“People do not live up to God’s ideals, and in some ways they can’t,” says Smith. “It’s great to proclaim, ‘There is no back door to marriage; you have to make it work no matter what.’ That sounds beautiful, and I believe it, but the idealism of my theology and the practicalities of what I see in this office don’t merge.
“I’m dealing with fallen people, the wounded—some from their childhoods, some through marriages—and they come in here bruised and broken and bleeding. To say, ‘You have to be healthy before you can come in here’ is like going to the hospital and saying, ‘You’re too sick to be in this hospital. Get out.’
“We talk a gospel of hope but don’t always practice it. The fear, I suppose, is that if we do, the floodgates will open. Well, we may think we are the valiant lad with our finger in the dike, but in reality the whole dam has already burst, and the reservoir has moved down into the valley.”
Still, recovery is not impossible. Says one instant mother, “My relationship with God is in a whole new place these days. Before my marriage, it was just he and I. Now it’s he and I and a whole bunch of other folks. I’m learning to wait on him for the help I need to deal with my problems.”
