No Laughing Matter: Remarried, With Children

At first, Rose had no idea that she was putting her stepchildren through culture shock when she tried to make conversation with them at the dinner table.

She and Ted had just been married and, hoping to get off to a good start, had moved his two teen-agers and her two younger children into a new home. Rose had looked forward to getting to know her stepchildren better during the dinner hour, which had always been a time for animated talk in her family.

However, she soon learned that Ted’s children were accustomed to silence at the dinner table. When she tried to draw them out with questions, they just looked at each other and giggled. And then her 8-year-old, the youngest of the four, moved into the void and quickly established a reputation as the family clown.

Rose was appalled at the regression she saw in her own child as well as the lack of interest of both her stepchildren and husband in what she regarded as the most basic form of family interaction.

That immediate clash of styles at the dinner table turned out to be the first of many signs that this newly integrated family was never going to be anything like the “Brady Bunch,” which always resolved its differences by the end of each half-hour episode.

Five years after Rose and Ted were married, there were two families sitting around her dinner table instead of one. The family dog still belonged to Ted’s clan, and the household rules were still a confusing mix of his and hers.

Rose, an Orange County resident who asked to remain anonymous, finally gave up. She and her two children recently moved out. And she doesn’t expect to return because, she says, she’s seen enough to feel certain that two such different families could never be blended.

She reached that painful conclusion after several years of therapy--with Ted and on her own--and many attempts to establish a bond with her stepchildren. She’s one of many stepparents who have ended up accepting defeat after years of diplomatic efforts that not only proved fruitless but also frequently backfired.

Gordon and Carri Taylor, who lead workshops on stepparenting as lay counselors at the Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton, say about 65% of all second marriages end in divorce, and about 85% of third marriages fail. Next to money, the Taylors say, the biggest source of conflict in these marriages is the children.

Carri, whose daughter was 14 when she and Gordon were married nearly six years ago, says bringing two families together under one roof is like trying to put a broken dish back together and discovering the pieces are not from the same plate.

“Stepfamilies are born of conflict and loss. The continuing conflict is what tears them apart,” adds Gordon, who is president of the Diamond Bar chapter of the Stepfamily Assn. of America.

The Taylors, who often speak from their own experience in their workshops for stepfamilies, say many couples set themselves up for failure by going into their second marriage with the “Brady Bunch fantasy.”

When the fantasy breaks down, the first impulse of many who have already been divorced once is to tell themselves, “I’ve been through enough pain; I’m bailing out,” Carri says.

She says the ones who make it through this period and begin to resolve their problems have a good chance of reaching a point where they can say, “We’re different and it’s OK. We may not be like a blood family, but we feel like family.”

Now that Rose has some distance from the stress that started as soon as she and Ted were married, she can see what kept their families from melding.

She and Ted were so immersed in their passionate courtship that they didn’t become aware of basic differences in their approaches to family life until after the wedding.

For example, Rose says, she discovered after they had merged their families that Ted had no interest in setting rules for the children or enforcing them. “I was used to having boundaries for children; he wasn’t.”

She also expected the children to help around the house, but Ted asked little of his teen-agers, and when Rose made demands of them, they usually ignored her.

“I’d ask his daughter to feed the dog, and she’d say OK--and then wouldn’t do it,” Rose explains. “She felt she didn’t have to do what I said. If her dad asked her, she’d do it.”

Rose tried to maintain her style of discipline with her own children, but they felt they were being picked on because they were required to do chores and meet curfews while Ted’s kids had almost total freedom. With a permissive parent in the same household who shared the children’s belief that she was too strict, Rose found herself always thrust in the role of the bad guy.

Meanwhile, Ted often made points with her children by giving them money they hadn’t earned.

“It was a payoff,” Rose says, noting that Ted didn’t get involved with her children in ways that might have built an emotional bond. Nor did he support her efforts to befriend his children, she says. They never managed to approach parenting as a team.

Rose admits she set herself up for disappointment by going into her second marriage “expecting the world.” But her biggest mistake, she says, was not recognizing that she and Ted didn’t communicate well enough from the start to really get to know each other.

“You need to be open enough to reveal what makes you the way you are,” she says.

Randy and Joy Baxter of Diamond Bar have spent their first four years of marriage trying to accomplish what Rose and Ted couldn’t. The Baxters have had their share of turmoil, too, but in their case, conflict has begun to give way to cooperation and a growing sense of family unity.

Randy has two daughters, ages 13 and 15, who spend every other week with him, but live close enough when they’re with their mother to drop by every day after school. Joy has a 9-year-old girl, whom Randy has adopted.

Randy says his daughters were afraid to get close to Joy at first because they didn’t want to be disloyal to their mother. They were also jealous of their stepsister, because she lived with their dad all the time.

They expressed these uncomfortable feelings indirectly, mostly by fighting with each other and questioning the authority of their stepmother, who just wanted everyone to be “calm, normal and happy.”

Joy says she now sees that she tried too hard to get close to her stepdaughters before they were ready.

“I was a child of divorce, and I wanted to be more to them than my stepmother was to me. They had all this pain, and I wanted to be their salvation,” she explains.

Six months after she married Randy, Joy was in therapy, learning how her own need for acceptance was interfering with her ability to help her stepdaughters through a difficult period of adjustment.

She and Randy eventually found their way to the stepparenting workshops at the Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton, where the Taylors helped them adjust their expectations to a more realistic level and improve their communication skills.

They learned to step back from their anger and turn their children’s power plays to their own advantage. For example, when Randy’s daughters questioned authority by insisting, “Mom always lets me do that,” he’d say, “Let’s call her and find out.” And the children would back off.

And when they threatened to flee to their mother’s house because they weren’t getting their way, he’d tell them, “It’s up to you,” instead of arguing. They’d always stay--and soon the threats stopped.

Randy and Joy also started holding regular family conferences to give the children a chance to release their anger in a constructive way. (At first, the girls insisted on calling these sessions “people conferences” because they refused to acknowledge this was a family, Joy recalls with a smile.)

Joy says she felt enormous relief when she stopped trying to be a perfect stepmother and “learned to allow the kids to have their feelings--no matter how negative they were.”

They gradually worked through their fears and began to relate to Joy as the friend she had always hoped she could be to them.

If children in stepfamilies are allowed to move at their own pace, they eventually “buy into the family and decide to make it work,” notes Carri Taylor.

Carri had been divorced for five years before she married Gordon, and her daughter, Gina, was not at all interested in sharing her mother or having a stepfather. But Gina, at 20, can now say, “Gordon is the best thing that ever happened to us.”

Gina, a single parent whose mother and stepfather are helping her raise her baby, says she was able to stop seeing Gordon as a threat and, eventually, make him a confidante because he never tried to force any false sense of closeness between them.

Gordon says stepparents often make the mistake of trying to “break into the family” overnight instead of letting their relationships with stepchildren evolve.

He says it quickly became clear to him that Gina wouldn’t accept his authority until they had formed a strong emotional bond, so he stepped back and allowed Carri to be the primary authority figure.

He concluded that “the stepparent will be an intimate outsider at best.” And having accepted that, he was able to be more patient with Gina when she was hostile toward him--or pretended he didn’t exist.

At the same time, Carri realized that her husband and daughter had to resolve their own conflicts.

“I had to pull myself out of the middle so they could develop their own relationship,” she says.

As Gordon and Gina began to grow close, they started shopping together and discovered this was when they could communicate easily.

Effective communication is what the Taylors emphasize most in their workshops for stepfamilies because they know from their own experience how vital it is.

Says Carri: “You can get through anything if you learn how to talk to each other.”