Remarried with Children: Ten Secrets for Successfully Blending and Extending Your Family - Softcover

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Barbara LeBey is a lawyer, former judge, and a wife, mother, and grandmother. Her first book, Family Estrangements, was featured in People magazine, as well as on Good Morning America and The Today Show. She lives with her husband in Atlanta, Georgia.

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It's the most daunting task many parents will ever face: bringing two growing families together into one brand new marriage. But even though statistics show that most remarriages are at high risk--especially when there are kids involved--more and more people are learning how to make them work and more and more kids are coming out of them with their psyches and souls intact. This honest and hopeful book looks at those successes--and at some failures--to show what they have in common: ten essential secrets that are at the heart of a healthy blended family.
As a stepparent with six children in a blended family, Barbara LeBey draws on her own family's hard-won success, as well as on extensive interviews and new research to show how to navigate the stresses, sticking points, pitfalls and perils most couples don't even anticipate. Starting with her first controversial secret--that the new marriage comes first, even before the demands of the children--LeBey debunks prevalent stepfamily myths and anticipates common traps. (Among them, money issues, warring stepsiblings, and destructive exes.) A strong advocate for children (including how to guard against fade-out parenting), she also suggests ways that in-laws, schools, and the legal system itself could provide better support for blended families. REmarried with Children is an expert, compassionate, down-to-earth book to turn to over and over again for advice, support and sanity.
Key topics include how to:
-Meet your children's and stepchildren's needs--without letting them undermine your new marriage
-Understand the new roles, new rules, and the new relationships for children and stepchildren of a blended family
-Deal withangry and/or manipulative exes--without adding fuel to the fire
-Handle key decisions about finances, religion, traditions, behavior and discipline
-Maintain healthy relationships with your children's grandparents--and other relatives--from a previous marriage
-Recognize warning signs of trouble ahead--and get the help you need

"From the Hardcover edition.

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one

The Obstacle Course

Secret One:

Put the marriage first.

As a more mature person, you can do it right this time. You are en- titled to another chance at happiness, but this time the love that you start your marriage with has to be big enough and wise enough to embrace a ready-made family. Divided loyalties, guilt, unreasonable expectations, unscrupulous people, and manipulative children, even your own, can be obstacles in your way to a successful remarriage. Anticipating them and understanding them will help you to achieve your goals.

While it’s true that all families have a past, blended families have a more complex one—the ghosts of marriages past. These ghosts of prior marriages and divorces can haunt your house and everyone in it, even ruin your present marriage.

“After we returned from our honeymoon, my husband’s two children from his first marriage came to visit for the weekend,” says one distraught second wife. “I had no idea what I was getting into. I was so emotionally drained after their visit, I almost packed my bag and left, except that it was my house, and I certainly didn’t intend to leave my own house. Had I been living in my husband’s home, I probably would’ve left, and that would’ve been the end of a very short marriage.”

Today, when we talk about the blended family, we mean parents and the children and stepchildren from the various marriages. But the distressing fact is that former in-laws, present in-laws, your ex, and your spouse’s ex are as much a part of your new family as the cantankerous old uncle or boozy cousin who used to disrupt every family gathering. This may not be the news you want to hear, but it’s a reality that cannot be ignored. They are and will remain the extended family.

The emotions generated from this archive will invariably spill over into your new family. How much should couples allow this history to penetrate their new lives together? As little as possible. But there’s the rub, because sometimes the new family is virtually held hostage by ex-spouses and ex-grandparents and the damage they can cause, not only to the adults of the remarriage but to the children. Sadly, the children themselves are often enlisted to play the role of saboteurs. It’s true. That kid you love can be out to destroy your new happiness.

Wittingly or unwittingly, ex-spouses, natural children, stepchildren, former in-laws, as well as present in-laws, can trigger unlovely emotions in you, too. Jealousy, unreasonable expectations, divided loyalties, and guilt are common even in the most well-adjusted adults. Those are the obstacles we put in our own way. Typically, these emotions lead to defensive or manipulative behavior as one attempts to eliminate these new intruders from one’s life or, at the very least, to minimize the damage they can cause.

Human relationships work like the law of physics—matter cannot be created or destroyed. It’s the same way with a previous marriage. It cannot become a marriage that never existed; the ex-spouses never disappear, and the kids are never unborn. Maybe your husband’s ex-wife is still pining away or showing up at odd hours to peek in your windows or calling at the last minute to change visitation dates.

In the stories that follow, heightened emotions of family members are vividly illustrated by the events of the blending process. You will see that when you put the marriage first, you benefit the blended family far more than if you as a newly married couple had focused only on the children’s adjustment to your new relationships. SAcred Vows

Ancient words of wisdom from the Bible advise newlyweds to place their loyalties to their spouse—“leave your father and mother and cleave to your [spouse.]” (Gen. 2:24) If it were written today, I believe the adage would certainly encompass second marriages, where the stakes are even higher and where many more people have claims on the time, attention, and emotions of the married couple.

With first-married couples trying to form an independent family, they must renegotiate relationships with parents and extended family. And since those bonds took years to form, the process of breaking away to create a new unit isn’t automatic. It’s an ongoing task. But we don’t break away from children, so the challenge of forming a solid and loving marriage must include the connections to children from prior marriages as well as to the people who are related to those children.

A successful remarriage is a gift to everyone concerned, and particularly to children who have already suffered through the death of a parent or through a failed marriage. They don’t need another loss or failure. Experts who advocate that the children must come first are losing sight of the effect another divorce would have on the children. Nevertheless, it’s not unusual for children of divorce to view the new marriage as a threat to achieving their fantasy—getting their natural parents back together, restoring what they have sadly lost, and maintaining the close and loving relationship they had with a parent who is now in the throes of love and passion with a new partner. This means that putting the marriage first is, in every sense, the ultimate challenge of most remarriages with children.

The first remarriage I’ll discuss began with an adulterous affair. This is not the best way to begin blending a family, but it happens more often than most of us would care to admit. It is a particularly interesting story because so many of the people involved agreed to be interviewed—the remarried couple as well as a child from each of their prior marriages. It is also a microcosm of the multiple problems that can plague a blended family. The “Spookaboos” of Previous Marriages

At the time of our interview, Cynthia, a vivacious fifty-year-old woman, had been married to her second husband, Ted, for over twenty years. Cynthia and Ted have two children each from their first marriages.

“My dream all through childhood was to have a family of my own,” Cynthia told me. “I was the third child in my own family, the youngest by eleven years, so I always felt like an only child, with much older parents who had little time or patience for me. What I saw in other families was warmth and a sense of belonging that I never felt.

“As soon as I graduated from college, I rushed into my first marriage, because that was what my friends were doing, but I really didn’t know my first husband very well. I married for all the wrong reasons, not the least of which was to get away from home and because, as I said, it was the thing to do at the time.

“We turned out to be totally mismatched—different values, interests, and different goals for the future—only I didn’t know that when we got married. After five years and two children, I knew that I wanted a divorce, but I didn’t have the financial means to go it alone. Besides, if we divorced, my husband’s alimony and child support payments would be very limited. That’s when I decided to become a real estate agent. For the next five years, I worked hard and built a good career. My husband and I tried to get along, but we just couldn’t.”

To understand the problems that developed in Cynthia’s second marriage, it’s important to know the circumstances of their lives when she and Ted first met.

“Ted was married but wasn’t living with his wife. We both got our divorces and married about a year later. During the early years of our relationship, his first marriage was always a ‘presence’ in our home. It was as if his first wife, Valerie, was...