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Till Your Children We Do Part

© Mike Gowen

Maybe it’s time the traditional marriage vows were rewritten. Let face it, a large number of people who get married these days are often doing it for the second, third, or maybe even the eighth time. For many people however, myself no exception, the marriages fail because of friction between stepparents and stepchildren. Maybe we should just add an addendum to the wedding vows to give ourselves an easy out if the step kids don’t meet our expectations.

Love, Honor, & Obey
For Better for Worse
In Sickness and in Health
Till Your Children we do Part

Does this sound familiar? Sara, I love you but I just can’t handle the kids anymore. They don’t respect me. You spend all your time catering to them. We are never alone.

Welcome to Reality 101.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not easy tackling the role of a stepparent. Children can be downright brutal at times. Often they view the new person coming into their lives as an adversary. Young children who are cute and cuddly grow up to be teenagers. Face it. It’s much easier accepting a teen coming home stoned at four in the morning when they are yours. You still want to kill them but you accept it. It’s not so easy when you are the stepparent.

Unfortunately there are a large number of people who marry with blinders on looking only at their respective mate. They know you have children but just kind of expect that part to work out okay. If things don’t go according to plan they cry foul. Sometimes they even demand that you choose between them and your children. Beginning to understand why stepchildren are the number one reason second marriages fail?

Having made a feeble attempt to show empathy toward the stepparent let me move on. I have heard a number of people both male and female blast their stepchildren or their spouses because of them. Okay, if your spouse hid their children under a rock and the day after your wedding shouted, “Surprise” then maybe you have a legitimate complaint. If however the kids have been there since day one and life has just hit a bump in the road, well, I hate it for you. Children are not the enemy. They are just struggling to grow up. Sometimes I think stepparents need to do the same.

Regardless of the age of the child whether toddler, adolescent, pre-teen or teen, there are issues they will face because of divorce. Add to that the reality that sometimes you have an ex-spouse on the outside complicating things further and life can be pretty tough on both child and stepparent.