Ever feel like you and your husband are running two households in one home? Can you even remember why you married him? Where’d the romance go? Parenting your children consumes your day; parenting his kids consumes his. They’ve become the marriage’s focus, moving your relationship as a couple onto the back burner.
Co-parenting is tough. Between difficult exes, threatened spouses, manipulative children, communication challenges, and the messy aftermath of previous marriages, parents and step-parents alike have their work cut out for them.
Understand the obstacles to co-parenting, their effects, learn how to overcome them by collaborative planning, and keep your new marriage from ending the same way as your last one.
Mother's Day day isn't always smooth. It's even rockier for stepfamilies. Biological moms rock the boat when feeling envy over stepmothers' share of the children's affection, or feeling threatened by the presence of another woman in their children's lives. Meanwhile, stepmoms feel jilted out of their just desserts when something called “Mother's Day” is primarily about someone other than them, despite their maternal role in their new family.
The bitter pill is that Mother's Day is primarily about mothers. If both the bio and step moms in your family can share the day, then bravo: there's no need to read the rest of this. For the rest of us, here's a guide to being sensitive and understanding during a surprisingly tense holiday for stepfamilies.
Violated expectations breed strife. Everyone has ideas about how things should be, and dreams about how they will. And then, well, things aren't. The new wife, the old father, and the young children all have their own expectations; the thread that threatens to unravel your marriage is how everyone winds up wrong.
