Penny for your thoughts kids ....

I'd give anything to know now what my stepson's will feel and think about our family life when they look back, 20 years from now. Do they know just how much we love them? Will they be angry about anything? Will the appreciate everything we do for them? Will they ever have any concept of it? Everything we do as parents, is essentially to ensure that our family life is happy, secure, rich and builds a solid foundation for the kids to grow from. In the end, all of the ex-related hassles, all of the mediation, all of it is all a measure in one way or another to make sure we're all providing for the kids.

As a bio-parent, it's natural. You self-sacrifice and don't think twice about it. The unnatural part of being a step-parent is that all of your hard work and resources are going to benefit offspring that aren't yours. It makes no biological sense. I tend to lean a bit too heavily on biology and evolution sometimes, but it really does explain virtually all of the challenges intrinsic to being a step-parent. Being a step-parent requires us to rise above our biology. To be more giving, more self-less. To sacrifice, knowing that one day, there's a big chance that kid will never remember the night you cleaned up their barf. Or the night you read the extra chapters to them even though you were dead tired. Or that you were the only one that clipped their toe and finger nails. Or that you were the one who taught them how to curl their tongues. I know that somewhere, cumulatively it all contributes to what great kids they are, and hopefully what great adults they will be one day.

On the other hand, what I do get out of it is the love and respect of my husband, who I know loves me a little more everytime I'm selfless with his boys. I get a happy and secure marriage, that do and will bring me untold amounts of joy, long after the kids have left home. 13 years and counting. Can I get a whoop, whoop?! Just kidding. No, I'm not. Haha, just kidding. And what we get together is also the deep satisfaction of knowing we are modeling exactly the type of relationship we can only hope they find for themselves one day. I think sometimes, in all of the noise around "staying together for the kids" crap, how in world are kids supposed to know what happy looks like if they can't see it at home?

So, step/mentor/volunteer mommies/daddies - when you're feeling brutal on one of the bad days - take a step back and try to remember the bigger picture. Being a step-parent is a huge undertaking, but one that is much bigger than yourself. It's leadership. It's legacy. It's showing the young people of the world that there are things like hope, inspiration, dreaming and love that still make the world go 'round.

G'night!

Blindness

What it is and where it stops nobody knows
You gave me a life I never chose
I wanna leave but the world won't let me go
Wanna leave but the world won't let me go

-lyrics from Blindness, by Metric

I'm always struck by the paradoxes that exist in stepfamily life. I love the richness of my life. I love how dynamic my relationship is with my husband. The depth of our bond is so far beyond We Met, We Fell in Love, We started a Family/Got Married. It's so much more complicated. The complications can be exhausting. Emotionally and physically. I doubt Metric was writing about being a stepmother, but they might as well have been. I want to leave, but the world won't let me go. You gave me a life I never chose. Gawd, it's brilliant. There's a live clip at the bottom of this post for your listening pleasure.

When I'm away from home travelling, especially if I'm in a kid friendly place, like Orlando, I miss the boys so much. I imagine how excited they'd be to be on a trip together like that. And then there's nights like tonight, when the s'kid I struggle with makes me want to scream. My husband says he gets under my skin because we're so much alike, which I was willing to believe at one point. But tonight, my back is up. It's no one's fault, it's just one of those nights, when for me, all of the normal kids stuff is too much. The not listening, the fussy eating, the not cleaning up, the no-one respecting bedtime rituals and routines. Normal kid stuff on any other night. And then the kids having homework that is so time intensive that it requires parental involvement and the internet for 2 hours. I'm slowly becoming quite anti-homework. I never thought I'd say that, but what these kids have to do at such a young age is unfortunate. So much for being a kid.

I haven't been blogging much lately but I've been reading all of your blogs a lot more, commenting and right now I'm just waiting for insipration. And enjoying my Metric. Click here for Blindness by Metric.

H1N1, my new job and new insights

Hi everybody, I know it's been a while since I've been posting regularly. I've been super busy with a new job, that although its been a pretty significant change in my work and home life, its kept my mind off my husband's ex.

So in addition to the usual thoughts and challenges that we all share, my career has definitely been at the forefront of my thoughts. I've taken an internal marketing position that has me working not only solid 8:30 - 5 shifts, plus commuting time, I've also got a wack of more travel, local and international. As cool as that is, I miss my little guy terribly, wonder if my ambition will damage him permanently and am hoping he doesn't forget who I am. Okay, that's a little dramatic, but it does weigh on me. I'm lucky that my husband has a job that allows him to do all the kid related drop off and pick up - otherwise, this wouldn't really be an option for me.

Which brings me to my latest point of contention. After reading La Belle Mere's latest post on being child-free (I hear you sister), I'm cranky about how my stepfamily status limits my career. We can't move. I can't go global. Obviously because of the shared-custody arrangement. Not only does my paycheque support this ridiculous woman (the ex), but there's only so far I can go. Now, would I move my family for several years if a global promotion was in the picture? I can see myself in a cafe, along the river in Basel Switzerland, for sure. But whether I'd really go or not isn't the point. It's that is just one more bloody decision that's been made in my life, for me, but not by me.


On the positive side, this new job has been good for my family in a few ways. Mostly - I'm too busy to be irritated by what'shername. I haven't seen her face in ages. The kids never talk about her, and I'm never around when/if they call her. It's terrific. I'm too busy to see her, or think too much about her. I think part of my problem before was that I had entirely too much free time in my mind! I came from a sales position in a large geographical territory, so all those hours of driving gave me lots of time to think about everything that irritated me in life.

The one thing I do however, is when I am travelling and in my hotel room at night, is read all of your terrific blogs. As much as I'm definitely moving into a different phase of stepfamily life (we're heading into year 4) I can appreciate how much we've ironed out now, by remembering that I've felt everything that all of you newer stepmom's have felt. It gets better. I feel like we've moved mountains. But time really does heal.

But one thing that does not seem to change is that I do not understand, nor do I want to understand, the boys biomom. For example, the do-we, or do-we-not, vaccinate the kids against H1N1 thing. Bejesus woman, a 13 year old, healthy hockey playing kid died on Monday in the city between us. What's the hesitation? We're offering to get the kids vaccinated for H1N1, and for seasonal flu, and she's hemming and hawing. Since, not only does she not have a medical degree, nor a college/university degree, I'm having a little trouble understanding where her confusion about whether or not to trust a gaggle of infectious disease specialists, who have more education than she can fathom, is coming from. My husband and I just look at each other and shake our heads. There's no words for that kind of frustration. It's not that there isn't a place for alternative medicine, or differing options, but when kids are dying within 30 Km of our homes, WAKE UP. Make that decision about yourself, but not on behalf of your child, who trusts you to take care of them.


Anyway, that's me for tonight.

Making your marriage work, my 2 cents for Wednesday

Another terrific summary from the post Not So Brady: 4 Rules for Staying Together When You Remarry with Kids. I've re posted most of it below. Really, so much of making a stepfamily work is all about the marriage. The further my husband and I journey together on this path, the more and more I believe this. And furthermore, its about finding ways to make it easier for both of us. It has it's challenges both ways. As much as I have days when I feel that its an impossible journey, I look at my son, and I know that every night, I get to tuck him in and he goes to sleep in our house. My husband doesn't have that peace with his 2 older sons. Half the time, his boys are sleeping somewhere else. Experiencing another part of their life somewhere else. And when I imagine for one split second what that must feel like, I become convinced that stepmothering is a breeze compared to what it must feel like for him.



This is the excerpt from the blog post;



How do you make it work?


Here are four tips from Wednesday Martin, Ph.D., author of "Stepmonster: A New Look at Why Real Stepmothers Think, Feel, and Act the Way We Do."


1. Form an airtight, solid relationship and show it to your kids.
Martin suggests doing this in small, simple ways like holding hands or telling them about one of your couple rituals, like where you go for breakfast on Saturday mornings. Having an airtight marriage means acting like a team, especially when it comes to conflicts about discipline and manners.


2. Have some childless time with each other.
Acting as a team and conveying a solid relationship to your kids is easier if you take time to nurture it, says Martin. She urges full-time stepmothers to take a childless vacation each year, to carve out a few days in the year where you can just be a couple. Date nights work, as does making your bedroom a childfree zone.


3. Learn how to fight.
Fighting doesn't doom a relationship, says Martin. Fighting the wrong way does. She writes, "According to marital experts, it's not fighting itself or even the frequency of fighting that leads to marital instability. It's the way people fight. Some fighting styles can destroy a marriage, while others can actually strengthen it."


Some pointers:
Cushion a hard request between two loving acknowledgements ("I know it's difficult to deal with the tension between your kids and me. But I would just really like them to say hello to me when I walk in a room; Thank you for being so considerate of my feelings.");
Put off an argument until a better time;
Know when to walk away from a fight;
Avoid the "four horsemen" of fights: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling;
Break the tension with humor whenever possible.


4. Open up.
Ultimately, what binds a couple together more than anything, argues Martin, is opening up and being honest with each other, to risk rejection and fess up to your partner about why your feelings are hurt and what is so difficult in the union of families. She writes: "For women with stepchildren, that may mean swallowing your pride and making yourself vulnerable just when you feel most misunderstood and betrayed. But it is also likely to open the door to greater emotional closeness and a partnership that beats the odds."

I couldn't agree more with all 4 points, and for me, the greatest gains have come from opening up, being less guarded and truly trusting each other. The airtight relationship follows that, which the boys take great comfort in. My husband is a champion at healthy fighting. We often disagree about specific issues, but he likes to disagree in the most loving manner I've ever witnessed. Its a bummer when you feel entitled to your anger, but it's really taught me a lot about what loving behaviour truly is.

Thanks Wednesday!

Tell Oprah

Hi Ladies -

click this link to be forwarded to Wednesday Martin's blog for a push to highlight Stepmothers through a Tell Oprah campaign. Click HERE for the link.



I edited my letter to ask for a Canadian perspective as well.

My view on Separation Agreements

I have never quite understood the legal part of the whole"Separation Agreement/Parenting Plan" thing.

A plan set out a head of time to reduce conflict? check.

A plan that clearly lays out who is where, for how long and how much money moves around? check.

A plan that deals with contingencies, holidays, that sort of thing? check.

But the plan only works when both parents stick with it. And there's apparently no recourse, at least not in Ontario, if someone changes their mind. It's not enforceable. Who has ever heard of a legal contract that isn't enforceable? (Well the marriage 'contract' could be one of them, my inside voice says. There's severe consequences at least though for breaking that one). In theory a separation agreement is a fantastic idea. But in practice and in our experience, it seems like a wasted effort and a waste of money.

My stepkids mom and my husband had a separation agreement that said they had to live within 40 kilometers of each other while the kids were young. That was the working agreement for over 2 years and legally signed off on in March of last year ('08). In June, she decided she was going to move 60 kilometers away and needed our permission to break the agreement. As I blogged about while it was happening, we were adamantly against moving the kids away from us, from their school, from their grandparents, from their extended family and from their little brother. Her boyfriend could have moved in with her. And they were dating the entire 3 years that the first agreement was in all stages of development, why did she sign off on it when she was only going to change it?

The answer to this dilemma? She was going to do whatever she wanted anyway, so we needed to compromise said the lawyers. What the hell was the point of the agreement in the first place? Excuse me, can we get a refund on all the goddamned money we paid to hammer out the agreement the first time? What a waste of resources. Her response to my husband whenever he calls her on not putting the interests of the kids first is that he left their marriage, therefore he has to live with this now. He doesn't have any interest in responding to such a nonsensical and immature comment, but jeez, I'd like to have a go at it.

She's basically using the kids against him, as a bargaining tool, probably the worst thing any mother can do. I'm sure lots of mom's in intact marriages do this as well (and likely not intentionally). The you-made-your-bed-now-lie-in-it attitude conveniently takes all of the focus off of her part in the failed marriage and effectively ends all dialogue. This is co-parenting? This is we each parent however the hell we want to in our two separate homes and we don't give a crap about how things are going in the other house. On the one hand it makes sense, because they couldn't manage to figure out how to save the marriage in the first place, so well done communication now would be strange. But for the stepparent in this scenario, its so bloody frustrating! It makes sense to say, since we couldn't hack it in the same house, we have to live in the same city for the sake of our kids, so they can go to school and see us both during the week for significant periods of time. So their lives can continue on as uninterrupted as possible. Because once you have kids, isn't it all about them? And once you get divorced with kids, isn't part of it that you are so unhappy in your marriage that you risk becoming an unhappy and crappy parent? Divorce, ironically, is also an effort to save your children's future happiness - they have to see their parents happy to be happy. To know that they don't have to be condemmned to a loveless marriage. How are they supposed to know what to look for in a spouse if all they saw was mediocrity at best, growing up?

So now the kids are being shuttled across 3 highways, 60 kilometers both ways, 2-3 times a week. Awesome. Needless to say, everytime we get in the car now, they want to know how long we'll be in the car for, how they don't like long rides. The new amended agreement has been in the works since this spring and has yet to be finalized. Yet we've moved through the summer months without incident. Do we even need to finalize it? What for? Money keeps on flowing from our house to hers. The kids are on their new schedule. I say we tank the agreement all together and just wait until the next inevitable change. We'll at least save on legal fees.

But of course, I don't get a say - I'm just the stepmom. I just get to live with it.

Crankily yours,

One year later ...

My hubby and I happily celebrated our 1 year wedding anniversary tonight. Martini's and Ahi tuna and starbucks, at the restaurant, JAM we ate at the night he proposed. Perfection. 1 year of marriage, but 3 years of stepfamily life together. We've also just spent the last 2 weeks with the kids - 1 week at home out and about, and 1 week up at a beautiful cottage in Parry Sound, Ontario. Needless to say, I am full of reflection.

The week at home with the kids was great. All week at the cottage I wanted to put pins in my eyeballs and scream. Every day. I couldn't shake it either, I tried so hard. I knew there was seriously something wrong and I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Being a stepmother is hard for many obvious reasons. But there are lots of reasons it's hard that are things that can only be felt by those of us insane to choose this path in life. Evidenced here: a post by Jacquelyn at the becomingastepmom blog that totally describes the intangible challenges.

But one thing I'm learning is that as much as I try and pretend our family is the same as any other family, I have to admit we're certainly not. As Oprah would say, here are some things I (now) know for sure:

1. As a stepmother has (a generally out of control life), and I need to feel like the 'woman of the house' to maintain some semblance of control in my life.

2. Going on vacation with the stepkids' extended family is only recommended for the certifiably insane, and not for a stepmother.

3. Going on vacation with your own extended family is for the certifiably insane. How in god's name do those families that live with their older parents do it??

4. Being a stepmom, where another woman has an (invisible) role to play in your house, against your every wish in life, is hard enough (both ways imaginably) - so adding other mothers to the pot is a recipe for disaster. Vacation together at your peril.

5. "Vacation" as a parent is no longer a vacation. It's about creating an experience for your kids. But when I go back to work on Monday - that will be more of a vacation! When you have 3 years, instead of 8, to get used to this idea, it's still a challenge.

I'm warming up to the idea of reading the 40 reasons to not have children book author Corinne Maier that's been getting a lot of press lately. I have to say, I would never say I regret having children in my life, I truly adore every moment with my son, but that's not to say that there aren't times when I see childless couples and wistfully recall my carefree days pre-kids. Especially after a week like I just had. But to be honest, it wasn't the kids that drove me crazy, and it rarely is. Its the dynamic of the stepfamily that is hard. I think sometimes I need to feel like that's okay. I don't know if people in 'regular' families ever feel this way. Would I feel like this if all 3 of them were biologically mine? Would I be more secure in stepping up and taking control when I feel out of control? Well I guess the answer there is that I wouldn't be out of control, I'd be the only woman who mattered. And maybe that's what it's really about. Who knows.

All you need is love, Part II

I just recently found a new book on love. It isn't new I think, and I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I discovered it because Jon Gosselin (Jon & Kate +8) said he read it. But here's an excerpt from the author's website, and I couldn't agree with it more:

Communicating love isn’t as easy as feeling “in love,” because it’s quite a different thing. Falling in love is not an act of the will or a conscious choice. It’s effortless. One who is “in love” is not genuinely interested in fostering the personal growth of the other person. If the euphoric pleasure of being “in love” never ended, we might never experience true love and meaningful communication. Love is something you do for someone else, not something you do for yourself. Most of us do many things each day that do not come “naturally” for us. For some of us, that is getting out of bed in the morning. We go against our feelings and get out of bed because we believe there is something worthwhile to do that day. And normally, before the day is over, we feel good about having gotten up. Our actions preceded our emotions.The same is true with love. We discover the primary love language of our spouse, and we choose to speak it whether or not it is natural for us. You might not love the language itself, but speaking it will clearly communicate love to your spouse. Love is a choice. And either partner can start the process today.

The line that particularly gets me is about being interested in the personal growth of your partner. When my husband and I first became friends, our friendship coincided with a massive surge in personal growth (for me). As such, an expectation developed on my part that this kind of examination and growth would be a constant in our relationship. I've realized over the past few years that things would become more fluid over time, but I have to say, we are constantly
learning new things about each other.

If you go through the site, you can see what your specific "love language" is (click HERE), and either guess at your partners, or review it with them. Mine is "quality time". I for one, am relieved to see this in print somewhere. I think because we are so busy with full-time jobs, 3 kids, pets, a household to run (well we support 2), and that my language of love is the same as stepson Number 2, I feel SO GUILTY that I want this kind of love. Mostly because I feel like I am competing for attention with him. I take the backseat when SS2 needs this from my husband (and rightly so) which is just something that now as a mature person (because I grew) I have to suck up. But may be I shouldn't feel guilty. I must have figured that I didn't get enough attention from my parents as a child, so therefore this is how I primarily understand love now as an adult. I just have to make more of an effort to communicate this in a way that makes sense to my partner (who's primary language is physical).

It's also an interesting to try and figure out what your children's primary love languages are - and surprising that they can be so different. So I think SS2's is Quality Time, like me. SS1 might be Words of Affirmation. And I think Ben's too young to know yet.

So back to my meanderings on love and marriage of late; I think success in marriage depends on nurturing the things that brought you together in the first place. You need a lot more than love. You need a lot of patience, interest in your partner, awareness of the evolution of your relationship and some common goals to keep you moving. The Languages of Love concepts are intersting - its a great way to keep te communication fresh and puts a healthy perspective on how to keep each other's interests at heart.

(Caveat: this is a Christian book - I'm not religious at all, so I have no problem ignoring the religiosity and thinking about the concepts, which I think in this context is easy to do. For example, the stuff about the husband being the family leader - I 100% do not support the view that the husband, exclusive of the wife, is the leader in a family - and especially in a step-parent situation - the couple are the leadership for the family, the step/mother/father each contributing unique a bilities to the "leading" of the family unit.)

My Love and Sorrow music list is building!

Of course, I have to include The Scientist. What a gorgeous song.

If you have any favorite hearbreakers, send them my way.

Stina

Best Kiss Award

Remember the passion? Love it. About to celebrate our 1 year wedding anniversary and I still totally feel it.

Stina