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Surviving the Step Family
By Robert Carver
After eleven years of marriage I am a very happily married man in a "step family," or otherwise known as a blended family. But to reach this point my wife and I have had the strength of our marriage tested time after time and it still continues. From the day of our wedding, I realized just how different it is living in a stepfamily.
To survive and have a successful marriage is no easy task. Stir in children from a previous marriage, ex-spouses, ex-in-laws, and the extra baggage from previous relationships and you will realize just how different the stepfamily is. Each of these ingredients can bring with it a whole set of problems themselves that need to be dealt with.
This first thing to understand about a stepfamily is that it is not the same as a "traditional" family unit. Each stepfamily has its own set of variables, whether there are intrusive ex-spouses or ex-in-laws, young stepchildren, older stepchildren, the list goes on and on.
My personal situation was that my wife had two children each from her two previous marriages and I had two children from a previous marriage. Neither of my children lived with us, though my son would stay with us for a couple of months at time. So we started out with six children between us. If that wasn?檛 enough to put a stress on a marriage, my wife and I had a child and then we had seven.
There are several important things that I learned during my marriage that I feel would be helpful to pass on to others who are either already a part of a step family or are planning on marrying into one.
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