I Never Heard of Blended Families and Then I Got Married

I never heard the term "blended family" until after I got married. I got married 5 years ago. I had a 13 year old son and my husband had a 2.5 year old daughter. If you would have asked me before I got married what the term blended family meant..........I probably would have said the obvious but it takes experience of living in a blended family to fully understand the exact definition.

The first couple of years were awful. It was great to be married and my husband and I loved each other. But the work that went into our blended family and ironing out all the kinks that came from his family, my family and dealing with the exes.....it seemed to be a constant state of battling for something. I kept thinking peace and happiness were not ever going to happen for us. And for anyone who thinks being a step parent is easy. It has been one of the hardest jobs I've ever had to do.

Our battles were always over my husbands parents. But it was more than that. I always felt as if my husband never took up for me in any way when it came to his ex or his parents. So we would fight about that. We would fight over how to solve Christmas. We would fight over who would do what around the house and who was responsible for what. We were confused over roles, and expectations. We would get upset over trivial matters. And we couldn't figure out why everything felt so hard for us. Marriage wasn't supposed to be like this. Why was this not working out the way we planned? And then I started to read and understand that what we were was a blended family. I felt like a dimwit! We had been battling out all these wars within our household and here they had a name for our type of family. Why hadn't I heard of this before? So I read and read and began to understand that we had been trying to live our life as if we were a nucleus type family. And we weren't. Our dynamics were completely different. What worked for others wouldn't work for us. We had step children, and we were step parents and once we began to put everything into the right perspective it all began to function more smoothly.

After two years we were finally getting it. We felt so good we decided to add another baby. And he is our pride and joy. Along with the other ones of course but he especially glued us all together. He became the one thing that connected everyone to our family. And our family became a unit, a team and it became what it was...........a blended family.

Five years later we are still thriving and we are even better. It is so possible to have a healthy and happy blended family. We have overcome so many obstacles and have truly learned how to stay connected. I fully believe that there is a formula for success with blended families. Our formula for success looks like this:

1) Be willing to accept that your family is different- You won't be able to treat yourself or your family as if you are a unit together from day one. You haven't been. You have to take the dynamics of each family into consideration. Each child will have different parents and that is important. When you view yourselves as a blended family........you will behave like one.

2) Both families and their histories are important- One child's parent is just as important as the other child's parent. If one child will be at the other parents house........that is a priority and that child's other family does matter. Regardless of how you feel it has to matter.

3) When you married your spouse you married his life too- regardless of how difficult is gets sometimes you have to know you married your spouse knowing about the children and his ex too. It isn't always easy but sometimes you just have to co-operate for the sake of the kids. Even when you don't want to get along with the ex...........pretend that you do.

4) Communicate and Commit - Of all the things this one is such a priority. You must communicate a great deal. Always communicate and then communicate some more. Things get really hectic and chaotic with all the back and forth between homes that you must communicate. And then commit to what you communicated about. It makes up for all the battles. And it saves you a many from happening as well.

5) Never Give Up - the number one thing that has made us successful in our blended family is we never gave up on the desire to make it work. No matter how many fights, no matter how angry we were and no matter how much we felt like we couldn't do it anymore.......we got back up and tried again. And today we are so much farther and happier because we never gave up on trying to make it work.

And it can work for you too! Blended families are possible and being happy is very much within reach. Never give up.