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

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 literally haunting us.”

What Cynthia wasn’t prepared for was the shock and difficulty of dealing with some very troubled people. When she got to know Ted’s children, she understood what the late Ann Landers had to say on the subject: “The biggest cause of the breakup of a second marriage is the children.”

“Ted’s two children were the same ages as my children, which could have been an advantage, but it wasn’t. It only aggravated the problem. Ted’s twelve-year-old daughter, Rose, was hell-bent on destroying me, destroying our marriage, and getting her father to go back to her mother. With her mother’s prompting, Rose told terrible lies to her grandmother—Ted’s mother. She made up a story about my husband and me having sex in front of her and the other children. She accused me of using foul language and inflicting cruel punishments. At first I laughed at the absurdity of the accusations—until I realized how damaging they were, mainly because my husband’s mother wanted to believe they were true. In fact she did. That way she could convince herself that her son had married a depraved woman with monstrous kids who were having a destructive influence on her precious grandchildren. By playing into Valerie’s strategy and collaborating with her, my new mother-in-law could insure that her regular weekend visits with her grandchildren continued, instead of their coming to visit us.

“Having children of my own, I should’ve realized when divorced people marry each other, they’re getting involved with all the people from both former marriages. But when Valerie managed to drag my ex-husband into this test of wills, I thought I would lose my mind. She persuaded him to participate in her plan to destroy us as a couple.

“Despite the fact that my ex-husband knew me well enough to know there wasn’t any truth to these stories, he was so angry about my leaving him, and about his financial obligations to the children, that he was willing to collaborate with Valerie, even if it hurt our children.

“So, when my two children were with him for weekends or other visits, he vilified me. My daughter began to resent him. She refused to go with him when he came to pick her up. My son was too young to understand what was happening, so he continued his visits, and had to listen to all the vitriolic lies about me. When my daughter told me what her father was saying, I should’ve tried to stop it. But I’m not sure what I could’ve done, short of going back to court and having my daughter testify as to what was going on. And that was also true for Ted, because Valerie and his mother were doing the same thing—poisoning his daughters against us. There were times when I wanted to call it quits, but I loved Ted and knew that he loved me. We felt we deserved a chance to have a good life together. We hoped that our love for each other and for the children would save the day.”

My interview with Ted filled in the picture of his first marriage. “My wife came from a broken home. She was raised by an aunt and uncle, both staunch fundamentalists who believed spare the rod and spoil the child. I believe it had a very damaging effect on her. The first few years of our marriage were fine; then Valerie developed a serious drinking problem. When she was drunk, she became physically abusive to me and to our two daughters. We fought all the time, though it was usually Valerie screaming at me, and me taking it. I usually didn’t respond. That only made her angrier until she became physically violent. I should’ve left her years before I actually did, but I was afraid to leave the kids in her custody, and I certainly couldn’t work and take care of them.”

Nonetheless, when Ted divorced Valerie, he made no attempt to gain custody of his two daughters, then nine and twelve years old. He wanted to avoid a jury trial and the ugly revelations of Valerie’s alcoholism, the abuse, and her repeated infidelity. Instead, he agreed to a generous property settlement, alimony, and child support.

Though Ted was no longer living with Valerie when he met Cynthia, Valerie believed Cynthia was the cause of her marriage breakup. In the months before Ted and Cynthia’s marriage, Valerie began her campaign of vengeance. She placed an “anonymous” call to the Family and Children’s Service accusing Cynthia of abusing her own children. Cynthia hired a lawyer, who obtained a copy of the taped call. Valerie’s voice was unmistakable. Nevertheless, it triggered a full and humili- ating investigation of Cynthia’s home life, which ultimately came to nothing.

To avoid an escalation of the problem, Cynthia and Ted chose not to retaliate against their former spouses. All four children were being used as pawns in this dangerous game, particularly Ted’s older daughter, who had nothing but contempt for Cynthia.

The vicious intrusion from their prior marriages into their newly reconstituted family created an anguished environment for Cynthia and Ted. They would have been better off if they could have relocated to another city, but their careers and the visitation agreements precluded such a move. After three years of enforced visitation, Ted’s two children stopped seeing him.

“There was no point making them do something they didn’t want to do,” he said. “And their visits just caused havoc for all of us, so I decided to let it go.”

Both Cynthia and Ted say if they had it to do over again, they would still marry each other even if it meant going through the torment of those first few years. But they both admitted how naïve they had been. “What we needed,” Cynthia said, “and didn’t have was someone to tell us what we could expect. We were both blindsided.”

Once Ted’s children stopped visiting, Valerie became less of a problem, though she still made drunken calls in the middle of the night. Although Cynthia and Ted finally settled into a comfortable and relatively happy marriage, the fallout for the children had left indelible scars. Cynthia’s older child, Amanda, remains close to both of them. One of Ted’s daughters remains distant to him and to her mother and sister. Cynthia’s son is not close, but Amanda believes it is due to the “years of awful lies my father told about my mother.” Amanda was old enough to see through them, but her younger brother was “easily brainwashed.”

When Amanda stood up for her mother, her father cut her out of his life forever. “I’m just glad I have my mother and Ted,” Amanda told me. “He’s been a wonderful stepfather. Both of them have done everything for me.”

“In families like ours,” Cynthia said, “bitterness, revenge, and anger are constantly threatening to undermine the new family. Even destroy it. I’m just so grateful that the children have thrived and that Ted and I have had so many wonderful years together.”

Many Perspectives

What could Ted and Cynthia have done to prevent these painful and enduring family rifts? Were they truly helpless in face of the damage that was being inflicted by their former spouses and even Ted’s mother during the early years of their marriage?

One answer lies in Ted’s handling of his relationship with Rose, his older daughter, who had worked so tenaciously to break up her father’s marriage to Cynthia. She tried to turn into reality what many children fantasize about—that their parents will get back together again and reestablish the home that was broken. Right at the beginning, Ted should have sat down with Rose and explained to her that many times a married couple find that they are unable to live together anymore but that it doesn’t mean they love their children any less. This is particularly important for the parent who has moved out, since the children will inevitably experience a sense of rejection, abandonment, and jealousy of the new spouse. Rose’s world had fallen apart, so she tried to manipulate the situation in order to get her family back—the only family she ever wanted. And this was the time when Cynthia needed to show her new stepdaughter some real understanding and greater affection, though it was the hardest time to do both.

Ted’s younger daughter, Paula, shed additional light on the situation. In our interview, Paula blamed her mother for most of the problems but ...