Are blended families healthy?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My friend just got married for the 2nd time. She has an only child. He just graduated from high school. The new husband has 3 adult children, one of whom is still trying to launch (in between school and work).

They will have a home where his youngest adult child is living while she gets school and work issues back under control. And the bride's kid will come home on school breaks.

I am optimistic that this will be okay. The only child seems okay with it. His father has a whole complicated thing going on at the other household. That will never be palatable.

So basically this young adult has one home with a "whole complicated thing" and one home with a failure to launch stepsibling who is also adjusting to a new stepmother and all the tension that brings with it, but everything will be okay. Awesome. Yay divorce, yay blending. Great deal.

[Anonymous]

Never.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My friend just got married for the 2nd time. She has an only child. He just graduated from high school. The new husband has 3 adult children, one of whom is still trying to launch (in between school and work).

They will have a home where his youngest adult child is living while she gets school and work issues back under control. And the bride's kid will come home on school breaks.

I am optimistic that this will be okay. The only child seems okay with it. His father has a whole complicated thing going on at the other household. That will never be palatable.

So basically this young adult has one home with a "whole complicated thing" and one home with a failure to launch stepsibling who is also adjusting to a new stepmother and all the tension that brings with it, but everything will be okay. Awesome. Yay divorce, yay blending. Great deal.

Well OP was asking if any of it ever works out.

My friend and her husband are friendly and reasonable people. The kids who will share their home are both kids who need to figure some stuff out, but there aren't serious problems like substance abuse, etc. And the house is massive. So there's comfortable room for everybody. And it's nobody's childhood home. So no territory marking.

I agree, the Ex-H's circus is a problem. But nothing to be done about that. Situation so bad, divorce was definitely the best solution. I foresee that moving to a "no relationship with Dad" situation. Already starting. So that kind of decomplicates things because there may be no relationship left to strain.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My friend just got married for the 2nd time. She has an only child. He just graduated from high school. The new husband has 3 adult children, one of whom is still trying to launch (in between school and work).

They will have a home where his youngest adult child is living while she gets school and work issues back under control. And the bride's kid will come home on school breaks.

I am optimistic that this will be okay. The only child seems okay with it. His father has a whole complicated thing going on at the other household. That will never be palatable.

So basically this young adult has one home with a "whole complicated thing" and one home with a failure to launch stepsibling who is also adjusting to a new stepmother and all the tension that brings with it, but everything will be okay. Awesome. Yay divorce, yay blending. Great deal.

Well OP was asking if any of it ever works out.

My friend and her husband are friendly and reasonable people. The kids who will share their home are both kids who need to figure some stuff out, but there aren't serious problems like substance abuse, etc. And the house is massive. So there's comfortable room for everybody. And it's nobody's childhood home. So no territory marking.

I agree, the Ex-H's circus is a problem. But nothing to be done about that. Situation so bad, divorce was definitely the best solution. I foresee that moving to a "no relationship with Dad" situation. Already starting. So that kind of decomplicates things because there may be no relationship left to strain.

Well, you think there's no substance abuse problem at this time. My stepbrother kept his a secret for a long time too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This was my suspicion. I live with my two teens and he has a 9 yo. We've been together over a year and I know it may be on his mind to ask me to move in. My gut tells me to just keep it as is until they head to college. We both have homes about 20 min from each other, his is just larger, so in his mind it makes sense. But I think for kids it's enough change having shifted houses from the divorce (schools/activities/friends all stayed the same).

The personal experiences are really helpful to hear-- if anyone works where they see the impact of "wishful thinking," I would love to hear.

My mother proudly told anyone who would listen that she and the man she married when I was 14 "didn't even see a difference between her kids and his anymore." She pushed this bs right after they married and continued to do so for the rest of her life. According to her we were all just one big happy family like we'd been together from the start. A happily blended family, and it had worked out perfectly. To this day I don't know if this was wishful-thinking delusion or performative (she desperately wanted everything to look great to everyone on the outside), but he would beat me at least once a week while his kids walked on water. There was a huge budget for his kids' clothes, sports equipment, etc, and nothing for us -- zilch. In high school I bought my own clothes from thrift stores while my step siblings were purchased not only clothes but skis, dirt bikes, etc. I literally didn't even have underwear and socks. My mother wasn't free of blame either, not only did she allow all of this, she treated his daughter like dirt, out of jealousy, every chance she got. Not only was it not happy, there was abuse and it was traumatic.

So you can't believe the parents when they say it all turned out great. I wouldn't even believe the kids, unless it was every single kid in the family who thought that it had all worked out fine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Another way wishful thinking can bite people is financial wishful thinking. Thinking you can afford more kids than you actually can, not understanding how expensive teenagers can be, not understanding child support rules in your state (like what modifications are possible), not understanding that an "ours" baby might be pretty expensive.

Wishful thinking means telling yourself you're modeling a happy marriage when in fact you're modeling another crappy marriage.

Thinking that because the kids get along in small doses, or pretend to, that they'll be fine living together. It's just not the same thing at all.

It's wishful thinking to thing step-parenting ends at 18 or 21 or college graduation. Go into this with an understanding that when adult children have life events, any sort of serious problem, or make a big mistake somehow, they first place they'll turn is their bio parents. And they'll want their bio parents to participate in their life events and eventually be engaged in grandparenting. It doesn't stop.

This. Things can be just as complicated, if not more so, when the kids are young adults and have started families of their own. If a kid marries someone from an intact family, guess where they will be going for holidays with the grand kids...to the stable both-parents-are-still-there house. And what if there is a financial or mental health crisis and the adult kid wants to come home?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DCUM hates blended families and divorces in general. They’d rather be miserable together.

It's okay to hate people hurting children.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can you speak more to those adult level complexities? What might help if partners were amicable?

It does help if they are amicable, but you can't amicable your way out of the logistics. It's a fantasy of divorced people that "amicable" makes it all okay. Things like:

I can't spend a lot of time with both my parents simultaneously, because they don't live near each other. So in order to get a decent amount of time with them, it takes me twice as much of my annual leave plus a travel day to get from one to the other. But I don't get extra annual leave just because my parents are divorced. I can't tell my boss "Oh, but they're so amicable" and get extra days off. So my parents each get less grandchild time. My mom didn't think about this when divorcing but she's unhappy about it now.

There's not enough room at my mom's house for us to visit and her partner's kids to visit at the same time. Not enough beds and also very crowded in the daytime now that there are grandkids. So we have to coordinate schedules. We also have to coordinate our schedule with my dad and his new wife. And her partner's kids have their mom too. So any sort of decision about who's visiting at what time, or when the grandparents travel to see anyone, has to go through multiple households for approval. This isn't the end of the world, but it's a level of hassle I wish I didn't have to go through. I wish things were simple.

At one point my dad's wife's son was doing a failure to launch thing, living with them and secretly drinking. My dad was super unhappy about it, he and his wife and her son had all these yelling fights, he fought with his wife and blamed her parenting, etc. etc. You couldn't be in that house at all without this tension hanging over everything and the kid moping around hung over. It went on for about two years. It was very hard for me to see my dad so unhappy. No amount of "amicable" from my mom would have changed anything. Yes, intact families can have this kind of problem too, but blending families adds more people and gives them more stress to cope with, so it increases the chance of problems. More people, more problems. If it were a bio brother, I would probably have had a more loving relationship and been more patient with it, but since we didn't grow up together at all, he felt like an interloper and a burden and I just wished the whole thing wasn't happening.

Eventually I'll need to find two assisted livings instead of one, and it'll be harder because all of that will have to be coordinated with my sibling and stepsiblings if both are alive and we're trying to keep them together. I'll need to sell two homes instead of just one, again coordinating with sibling and stepsiblings. It's very difficult to make these big decisions with a big group of people who have different cultures and financial circumstances. No matter how amicable my mom is to my dad and vice versa, that doesn't change the complexity here. There's no Amicable Divorce Retirement Home where they hand you two units for the price of one because they're just oh so very amicable.

The worst part is that my mom's partner hasn't made good choices (nor have his adult children) so he can't retire, not ever. So my mom subsidizes him and will have to pick up the tab entirely whenever he becomes unable to work. Leaving me wondering if my mom will run out of money for herself and how that will impact myself and my sibling. This is not at all an inheritance battle-- there isn't going to be an inheritance. It's just me not wanting to have to effectively subsidize my mom's partner and his lifetime of dumb decisions. My mom refuses to discuss this with me and my sibling at all. They have remained unmarried so that he can qualify for Medicaid and food stamps etc. I don't want my mom to be single but I wish she had chosen someone who doesn't bring these problems with him. No matter how "amicable" my dad is, my mom's partner is still a broke, mooching loser. See what I mean? Amicable doesn't fix it.

These examples will no doubt cause people to tell me I need therapy. Because people don't want to face up to what divorce can mean in the long term. I think it's very, very important to be financially and mentally prepared for the difficulties to come. Divorce and "blending" can be very hard in the last years of a person's life.

I really appreciate you sharing your experience. Parts made me laugh, but it's easy to hear the pain there too and I'm sorry for that. All I can say in many of these situations, there's no perfect solve.

I wonder if it's amicable + resources for all parties that makes it more manageable, but logistics are logistics.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can you speak more to those adult level complexities? What might help if partners were amicable?

It does help if they are amicable, but you can't amicable your way out of the logistics. It's a fantasy of divorced people that "amicable" makes it all okay. Things like:

I can't spend a lot of time with both my parents simultaneously, because they don't live near each other. So in order to get a decent amount of time with them, it takes me twice as much of my annual leave plus a travel day to get from one to the other. But I don't get extra annual leave just because my parents are divorced. I can't tell my boss "Oh, but they're so amicable" and get extra days off. So my parents each get less grandchild time. My mom didn't think about this when divorcing but she's unhappy about it now.

There's not enough room at my mom's house for us to visit and her partner's kids to visit at the same time. Not enough beds and also very crowded in the daytime now that there are grandkids. So we have to coordinate schedules. We also have to coordinate our schedule with my dad and his new wife. And her partner's kids have their mom too. So any sort of decision about who's visiting at what time, or when the grandparents travel to see anyone, has to go through multiple households for approval. This isn't the end of the world, but it's a level of hassle I wish I didn't have to go through. I wish things were simple.

At one point my dad's wife's son was doing a failure to launch thing, living with them and secretly drinking. My dad was super unhappy about it, he and his wife and her son had all these yelling fights, he fought with his wife and blamed her parenting, etc. etc. You couldn't be in that house at all without this tension hanging over everything and the kid moping around hung over. It went on for about two years. It was very hard for me to see my dad so unhappy. No amount of "amicable" from my mom would have changed anything. Yes, intact families can have this kind of problem too, but blending families adds more people and gives them more stress to cope with, so it increases the chance of problems. More people, more problems. If it were a bio brother, I would probably have had a more loving relationship and been more patient with it, but since we didn't grow up together at all, he felt like an interloper and a burden and I just wished the whole thing wasn't happening.

Eventually I'll need to find two assisted livings instead of one, and it'll be harder because all of that will have to be coordinated with my sibling and stepsiblings if both are alive and we're trying to keep them together. I'll need to sell two homes instead of just one, again coordinating with sibling and stepsiblings. It's very difficult to make these big decisions with a big group of people who have different cultures and financial circumstances. No matter how amicable my mom is to my dad and vice versa, that doesn't change the complexity here. There's no Amicable Divorce Retirement Home where they hand you two units for the price of one because they're just oh so very amicable.

The worst part is that my mom's partner hasn't made good choices (nor have his adult children) so he can't retire, not ever. So my mom subsidizes him and will have to pick up the tab entirely whenever he becomes unable to work. Leaving me wondering if my mom will run out of money for herself and how that will impact myself and my sibling. This is not at all an inheritance battle-- there isn't going to be an inheritance. It's just me not wanting to have to effectively subsidize my mom's partner and his lifetime of dumb decisions. My mom refuses to discuss this with me and my sibling at all. They have remained unmarried so that he can qualify for Medicaid and food stamps etc. I don't want my mom to be single but I wish she had chosen someone who doesn't bring these problems with him. No matter how "amicable" my dad is, my mom's partner is still a broke, mooching loser. See what I mean? Amicable doesn't fix it.

These examples will no doubt cause people to tell me I need therapy. Because people don't want to face up to what divorce can mean in the long term. I think it's very, very important to be financially and mentally prepared for the difficulties to come. Divorce and "blending" can be very hard in the last years of a person's life.

I really appreciate you sharing your experience. Parts made me laugh, but it's easy to hear the pain there too and I'm sorry for that. All I can say in many of these situations, there's no perfect solve.

I wonder if it's amicable + resources for all parties that makes it more manageable, but logistics are logistics.

Wealth and large homes do help in some ways, but add complexity too. Wealth can ease stress and lower workload, but it can also be something to fight over. It's hard when different branches of th stepfamily have different cultures and circumstances surrounding money. Big homes are harder to manage and it's hard for the adult children to help manage and maintain two properties rather than one. If I could hire a lot of help for the big decisions and moves that would make a difference. Not living far apart helps too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My friend just got married for the 2nd time. She has an only child. He just graduated from high school. The new husband has 3 adult children, one of whom is still trying to launch (in between school and work).

They will have a home where his youngest adult child is living while she gets school and work issues back under control. And the bride's kid will come home on school breaks.

I am optimistic that this will be okay. The only child seems okay with it. His father has a whole complicated thing going on at the other household. That will never be palatable.

So basically this young adult has one home with a "whole complicated thing" and one home with a failure to launch stepsibling who is also adjusting to a new stepmother and all the tension that brings with it, but everything will be okay. Awesome. Yay divorce, yay blending. Great deal.

Well OP was asking if any of it ever works out.

My friend and her husband are friendly and reasonable people. The kids who will share their home are both kids who need to figure some stuff out, but there aren't serious problems like substance abuse, etc. And the house is massive. So there's comfortable room for everybody. And it's nobody's childhood home. So no territory marking.

I agree, the Ex-H's circus is a problem. But nothing to be done about that. Situation so bad, divorce was definitely the best solution. I foresee that moving to a "no relationship with Dad" situation. Already starting. So that kind of decomplicates things because there may be no relationship left to strain.

There is a flipside to this: no childhood home to return to and feel safe in, either.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can you speak more to those adult level complexities? What might help if partners were amicable?

It does help if they are amicable, but you can't amicable your way out of the logistics. It's a fantasy of divorced people that "amicable" makes it all okay. Things like:

I can't spend a lot of time with both my parents simultaneously, because they don't live near each other. So in order to get a decent amount of time with them, it takes me twice as much of my annual leave plus a travel day to get from one to the other. But I don't get extra annual leave just because my parents are divorced. I can't tell my boss "Oh, but they're so amicable" and get extra days off. So my parents each get less grandchild time. My mom didn't think about this when divorcing but she's unhappy about it now.

There's not enough room at my mom's house for us to visit and her partner's kids to visit at the same time. Not enough beds and also very crowded in the daytime now that there are grandkids. So we have to coordinate schedules. We also have to coordinate our schedule with my dad and his new wife. And her partner's kids have their mom too. So any sort of decision about who's visiting at what time, or when the grandparents travel to see anyone, has to go through multiple households for approval. This isn't the end of the world, but it's a level of hassle I wish I didn't have to go through. I wish things were simple.

At one point my dad's wife's son was doing a failure to launch thing, living with them and secretly drinking. My dad was super unhappy about it, he and his wife and her son had all these yelling fights, he fought with his wife and blamed her parenting, etc. etc. You couldn't be in that house at all without this tension hanging over everything and the kid moping around hung over. It went on for about two years. It was very hard for me to see my dad so unhappy. No amount of "amicable" from my mom would have changed anything. Yes, intact families can have this kind of problem too, but blending families adds more people and gives them more stress to cope with, so it increases the chance of problems. More people, more problems. If it were a bio brother, I would probably have had a more loving relationship and been more patient with it, but since we didn't grow up together at all, he felt like an interloper and a burden and I just wished the whole thing wasn't happening.

Eventually I'll need to find two assisted livings instead of one, and it'll be harder because all of that will have to be coordinated with my sibling and stepsiblings if both are alive and we're trying to keep them together. I'll need to sell two homes instead of just one, again coordinating with sibling and stepsiblings. It's very difficult to make these big decisions with a big group of people who have different cultures and financial circumstances. No matter how amicable my mom is to my dad and vice versa, that doesn't change the complexity here. There's no Amicable Divorce Retirement Home where they hand you two units for the price of one because they're just oh so very amicable.

The worst part is that my mom's partner hasn't made good choices (nor have his adult children) so he can't retire, not ever. So my mom subsidizes him and will have to pick up the tab entirely whenever he becomes unable to work. Leaving me wondering if my mom will run out of money for herself and how that will impact myself and my sibling. This is not at all an inheritance battle-- there isn't going to be an inheritance. It's just me not wanting to have to effectively subsidize my mom's partner and his lifetime of dumb decisions. My mom refuses to discuss this with me and my sibling at all. They have remained unmarried so that he can qualify for Medicaid and food stamps etc. I don't want my mom to be single but I wish she had chosen someone who doesn't bring these problems with him. No matter how "amicable" my dad is, my mom's partner is still a broke, mooching loser. See what I mean? Amicable doesn't fix it.

These examples will no doubt cause people to tell me I need therapy. Because people don't want to face up to what divorce can mean in the long term. I think it's very, very important to be financially and mentally prepared for the difficulties to come. Divorce and "blending" can be very hard in the last years of a person's life.

I really appreciate you sharing your experience. Parts made me laugh, but it's easy to hear the pain there too and I'm sorry for that. All I can say in many of these situations, there's no perfect solve.

I wonder if it's amicable + resources for all parties that makes it more manageable, but logistics are logistics.

Wealth and large homes do help in some ways, but add complexity too. Wealth can ease stress and lower workload, but it can also be something to fight over. It's hard when different branches of th stepfamily have different cultures and circumstances surrounding money. Big homes are harder to manage and it's hard for the adult children to help manage and maintain two properties rather than one. If I could hire a lot of help for the big decisions and moves that would make a difference. Not living far apart helps too.

It can be horrible when one of the parents has the wealth and the other doesn't, and the kids aren't treated equally with regard to resources. It creates a bad situation where some of the kids are second-class citizens. I've seen this happen in more than one family. Very damaging.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My friend just got married for the 2nd time. She has an only child. He just graduated from high school. The new husband has 3 adult children, one of whom is still trying to launch (in between school and work).

They will have a home where his youngest adult child is living while she gets school and work issues back under control. And the bride's kid will come home on school breaks.

I am optimistic that this will be okay. The only child seems okay with it. His father has a whole complicated thing going on at the other household. That will never be palatable.

So basically this young adult has one home with a "whole complicated thing" and one home with a failure to launch stepsibling who is also adjusting to a new stepmother and all the tension that brings with it, but everything will be okay. Awesome. Yay divorce, yay blending. Great deal.

Well OP was asking if any of it ever works out.

My friend and her husband are friendly and reasonable people. The kids who will share their home are both kids who need to figure some stuff out, but there aren't serious problems like substance abuse, etc. And the house is massive. So there's comfortable room for everybody. And it's nobody's childhood home. So no territory marking.

I agree, the Ex-H's circus is a problem. But nothing to be done about that. Situation so bad, divorce was definitely the best solution. I foresee that moving to a "no relationship with Dad" situation. Already starting. So that kind of decomplicates things because there may be no relationship left to strain.

There is a flipside to this: no childhood home to return to and feel safe in, either.

Understood. But in this case the only kid grew up in three different places/houses. And I think he and his mom were more than ready to move away from the place where their family of 3 fell apart. With custody over, he doesn't have to get his nose rubbed in his dad's mess. So there's that.

[Anonymous]

At one point my dad's wife's son was doing a failure to launch thing, living with them and secretly drinking. My dad was super unhappy about it, he and his wife and her son had all these yelling fights, he fought with his wife and blamed her parenting, etc. etc. You couldn't be in that house at all without this tension hanging over everything and the kid moping around hung over. It went on for about two years. It was very hard for me to see my dad so unhappy. No amount of "amicable" from my mom would have changed anything. Yes, intact families can have this kind of problem too, but blending families adds more people and gives them more stress to cope with, so it increases the chance of problems. More people, more problems. If it were a bio brother, I would probably have had a more loving relationship and been more patient with it, but since we didn't grow up together at all, he felt like an interloper and a burden and I just wished the whole thing wasn't happening.

Same scenario here. Failure-to-launch kid has now entered his early 30’s being coddled by both my Dad and his wife and has never held a job he wasn’t fired from. No one is talking about how fast 40 comes when you have no work history. Unless he does some kind of major turnaround, he’s SOL. Which means he’ll remain on the family dole (ie my Dad’s tab) for life. I don’t expect sh#t from my Dad because my mom raised my sister and I to take care of ourselves. But watching stepbro and stepmom bleed my Dad dry because no one ever imposed consequences on this kid goes a hell of a long way to breed resentment. If he was my actual brother I would’ve sat his ass down a long time ago and sorted this out, but frankly he already has too many adults in his life carrying his water. He will eventually have kids, stay at home, and be congratulated for life for it while someone else does the heavy lifting. Book it.

[Anonymous]

I foresee that moving to a "no relationship with Dad" situation. Already starting. So that kind of decomplicates things because there may be no relationship left to strain.

Wow, what a win.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

At one point my dad's wife's son was doing a failure to launch thing, living with them and secretly drinking. My dad was super unhappy about it, he and his wife and her son had all these yelling fights, he fought with his wife and blamed her parenting, etc. etc. You couldn't be in that house at all without this tension hanging over everything and the kid moping around hung over. It went on for about two years. It was very hard for me to see my dad so unhappy. No amount of "amicable" from my mom would have changed anything. Yes, intact families can have this kind of problem too, but blending families adds more people and gives them more stress to cope with, so it increases the chance of problems. More people, more problems. If it were a bio brother, I would probably have had a more loving relationship and been more patient with it, but since we didn't grow up together at all, he felt like an interloper and a burden and I just wished the whole thing wasn't happening.

Same scenario here. Failure-to-launch kid has now entered his early 30’s being coddled by both my Dad and his wife and has never held a job he wasn’t fired from. No one is talking about how fast 40 comes when you have no work history. Unless he does some kind of major turnaround, he’s SOL. Which means he’ll remain on the family dole (ie my Dad’s tab) for life. I don’t expect sh#t from my Dad because my mom raised my sister and I to take care of ourselves. But watching stepbro and stepmom bleed my Dad dry because no one ever imposed consequences on this kid goes a hell of a long way to breed resentment. If he was my actual brother I would’ve sat his ass down a long time ago and sorted this out, but frankly he already has too many adults in his life carrying his water. He will eventually have kids, stay at home, and be congratulated for life for it while someone else does the heavy lifting. Book it.

Yes. It's so hard. Of course, it would be fair to say that your Dad chose this marriage and is choosing to pay for things (probably because his wife will leave him if he doesn't). But even so, it leads to a tremendous amount of resentment that, even if not openly expressed, damages family relationships. My father chose to marry someone with a pre-teen son, someone of a different culture with a *very* different parenting style and very different approach to substance use, and I don't think he truly understood how that would play out. Nor did he understand the trauma of the divorce the boy had already been through. Of course, these things don't always happen in a blended family. But it's the divorce and the decision to blend that opens the door to these things, and the trauma of the previous divorces and transition to blending stacks the deck. As you say, if he were my actual brother I would feel more emboldened to intervene. But that tends to go poorly in a stepfamily because his mother would defend him and my father would take her side. So all I can really do is distance myself.