So after a little too much to drink the night before and therefore a bit of a rocky start, the plan was to leave the local B&B where we had spent that first night and hit the road early the next morning. We were driving to Estes Park Colorado and wanted to get an early start. We were staying for a week. We had put some thought into what we were going to do with respect to the kids. The girls had asked more than once why they couldn’t come along, and I suppose that would have been one way to go. Selfishly, I guess, I wanted my new husband to myself for just a little while. I explained to the kids that usually a honeymoon was meant for the husband and the wife, as a private celebration of their launch into life together. I told them that we’d take a family Honeymoon later, which we did after a couple of years. We arranged on our wedding night for the kids’ Aunt to take the girls to a hotel and stay the night, where they could swim, stay up too late, watch movies, order room service…whatever. Her son came to our place to stay with our oldest son…to hang out, eat junk food, play video games…guy stuff. The morning we were to leave, I forget what it was now, but my husband had forgotten something back at the house and insisted we had to go by on our way out of town. This was not, I repeat not, a good idea. To this day I’m not really sure if he actually forgot something or whether he was having his own kind of separaton anxiety. Anyway, we all came to regret it. What happened was, the girls unfortunately were already back home, and seeing him got them all riled up and emotional. So as we try now to drive away we have these two 12 year old girls out in the front yard, in the cold, crying hysterically, physically clinging to their Dad, going on and on and on as if I was taking him away and they were never going to see him ever again. Great start, and there I sat in the car feeling like the evil one.
It didn’t end until some 9 or 10 hours later as the phone calls finally began to slow down and everyone calmed down. All the way from Kansas to Colorado my husband’s phone rang the entire time as the girls begged and pleaded for him to turn around and come back. My husband, trying to console the girls, felt bad so he kept answering and kept trying to convince them all was well. It was completely over the top. So much for a nice drive.
We had a very nice time on our Honeymoon. We talked to the kids every day to catch up, each day they got better. I think they finally decided they weren’t being totally abandoned after all.
Funny thing happened upon our return. We had the kids that weekend, so we picked up right where we had been when we left. Up until the point that we got married, the entire time we lived together, my husband and our son set up downstairs and the girls and I shared the main level. Again, he was concerned that we do this right; he was always mindful of what kind of example we were setting for the kids. That first night after we got back, he naturally moved upstairs with me and my room became our room. He was all up under the comforter still asleep that next morning, and one of the girls came into our room (I hope you aren’t operating under the illusion that you are ever going to have privacy again!) and said Christy, where’s Dad? I said he’s still asleep, and she said no he’s not, I just checked downstairs and he’s not down there. I pointed to her Dad on the other side of “our” bed and she sort of looked over, then looked at me as her eyes widened and the light bulb went on and she said, OHHHH! Funny!
The kids at some point, fairly quickly after we were married, were concerned with what they should call me; they didn’t know what I expected. I asked them what they wanted to call me, an absolutely loaded question with this group. They gave it a second of thought and said how about Christy. I told them I thought that was just fine. I took this same approach when it came to my parents. I mean, here these kids were 11 and 15, was it right to expect them to just start addressing people they really didn’t know all that well as Grandma and Grandpa? Some people might feel differently and insist, but I took their lead on it. This brings up another thing I personally sort of went back and forth on and that was, how I should refer to them. Introduce them and speak of them as my kids or my Step kids? I thought about their Mother and what she might think if she heard me refer to them as my children. I thought about the kids and whether it would make them uncomfortable if I did, like it would be a dig at their Mother somehow. Then I started thinking how it would feel, if I were them, and I was always introduced as a Stepchild. If we were to ever have children of our own, would that differentiation and separation cause hard feelings? Was it necessary? I kept coming back to family is family. I talked to my husband about it and he agreed, family is family, so that was that. I call them my kids, refer to them in public as such and introduce them to people this way. We only explain they are my Step Children if the situation warrants it for whatever reason. And I know by the smile on their faces when I refer to them this way, that for us, this was the way to go.
Lessons Learned
- If you marry a man with young children, there will come a time whey they realize everything has changed. I know that the girls’ hysterics the day after our wedding was really acting out both of fears they had and the realization that their Dad now had a new wife, the family dynamic had changed. It would never be the way it had been and the unknown is scary. As far as their behavior that day, I understood my new husband was in a heck of a spot, but he should have found a way to stop it. Maybe enlisted the help of his sister, or something like that. I think by not finding a way to shut it down, he unwittingly kept the drama going. Sometimes you just have to force an issue for the sake of everybody.
- Remember this is a huge adjustment for all of you. Help them along. Pretty soon they’ll adjust to the fact that you have a special relationship with their Father, one that doesn’t replace theirs, but one that is important in it’s own right.
- Think about things like how you want them to address you and how you will refer to them. I think that’s the case regardless of the age of the children, even grown ones. This may seem like not that big a deal, but I think it is. I should have given it more thought before I actually became their Step Mama.
- You may be in for some acting out of your own in various ways as you settle in as a new family. It’s not personal, really it isn’t. They just need reassurance….most of it I think stems from the uncertainty of just what this new life means for them. Give it time.
Good Step Mom
