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| 2nd Families |
Kindling New Kinships
Anne Field
11/01/2004
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Another financial
factor that can burden our new family is the child support and alimony payments
many of us pay to our first spouses. “In my practice, a lot of resentment
centers around the monthly check,” Poulter says. “That’s one of the top three
problems patients deal with.” In some cases, he explains, this can cause a
second spouse to feel so bitter about “excessive” payments that he or she takes
it out on the stepchildren. Poulter recalls the case of a high-profile
entertainment executive who paid $20,000 a month to his ex-wife. His second wife
of five years, however, so bristled at the amount that she found it difficult to
be civil to his two sons from the first marriage. She would, for example, refuse
to take them shopping, and insist that their mother pay for the items they
needed. She also objected to footing the bill for her young stepson’s summer
camp. (Her husband ended up paying.) “You have to stop your own resentments from
getting in the way of your relationships,” Poulter urges. He advises second
spouses to air these grievances early in the relationship, both in private
conversations with their significant others and during family meetings. Because
this is such a sensitive topic, families might benefit from professional
counseling to iron out any conflicts.
Age-Old Quandaries
A second marriage to a much younger spouse can carry
still additional challenges. The younger spouse’s relationship with older
stepchildren is often fraught with conflict, as he or she struggles with
balancing the role of authority figure against that of friend. Unfortunately,
neither role is without its perils. Younger spouses find it difficult to wield
parental authority if they are not much older than their stepchildren. Treating
stepchildren like peers only exacerbates this problem.
Mayer recalls a young
second wife who chose to behave more like a sister to her teenage stepdaughter
than as a mother. The woman allowed her stepdaughter to wear her clothes, borrow
her jewelry and use her makeup. It made them fast friends until the girl began
borrowing clothes without asking, ruining favorite dresses and leaving jewelry
and makeup scattered around her stepmother’s room. Finally, the new wife became
angry and, sounding much like an older sibling, told the girl she could no
longer borrow her things. The husband refused to get involved, leaving his
daughter to develop a sense of betrayal that grew into outright mistrust of her
stepmother.
Youthful Authority
To avoid these situations, younger stepparents often
find they must shoulder some of the burden of authority. We should unite with
our older spouse to establish clear, consistent rules stemming from both
parents. Young stepparents, especially stepmothers, also benefit from displaying
a positive attitude toward the first spouse. “It will cost you nothing to be
nice to the ex-wife, and everything if you’re not,” Poulter points out. “When
the stepmother bends over backward to make supportive comments about the
biological mother, for example, it can go a long way toward creating a trusting,
unthreatening relationship with the children.”
If a husband and his younger
wife produce their own children, a new set of tensions can materialize,
particularly if the father appears to pay more attention to his second set of
children, or lavish them with more luxuries than his first offspring. Hausner
tells of an entrepreneur who earned his wealth in real estate development when
his first two children were teenagers. After he had children with his second
wife, he was able to pamper them with many more luxuries, such as taking them on
his private jet and sending them to the best schools. This caused the older
children to resent not only their stepmother, but their stepsiblings as
well.
The family addressed the problem by holding a meeting. When the older
children voiced their resentments, the parents agreed to make concessions, such
as giving them a role in the family business, helping them when it was time for
them to buy their own houses and promising them larger shares of their parents’
estate. That discussion helped heal what was a widening rift in the household.
“The biggest problem in stepfamilies is when children feel they aren’t heard,”
Hausner explains.
New stepparents may also find their most aggravating
dilemmas are due to problems over which they have little control. Ongoing
conflicts between our new spouse and his or her ex-spouse can leave us at the
mercy of both the angry exes and the stepchildren. “If there’s bitterness
between the exes, you will always have challenges in the communications
process,” Poulter warns. His advice is to stay away from the conflicts. However,
if we have established a strong bond with a stepchild, we may find that it pulls
us into this fray. As a result, the child may suffer conflicting loyalties or
feel he is betraying a parent. “You’ll often hear stepparents say, ‘I was trying
so hard, then I got whacked in the face.’ They didn’t understand the dilemma the
child was placed in,” Hausner explains.
Dealing with complications such as
these are necessary if we want to build a healthy second family. We may find it
is a lifelong process. Even after nine years, Simon finds she must still work
diligently on her relationship with her stepdaughter. “There’s no road map for
parenting, and especially not for stepparenting,” she says. “I’ve learned there
just are no hard and fast rules.” If we are to make our second marriages work,
giving up is not an option.
Photo Illustration by Paul Collin. Section
Photography by Claudia
Kunin.
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