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Step and Blended…Seven years later…

April 30, 2009 in A Joyful Place Called Home with 0 Comments

Les & I began our journey as a stepfamily almost seven years ago. We began with a marriage that brought his children and job 400 miles from where they had lived. They changed from a urban area to a rural area, the children changed schools, cultures, and situations at home.
Les & I were both very aware we were a step family. He had grown up in one, and had been the son who saw parents struggle after divorce and remarriage. I had been the one who only knew step families through a very limited perspective as a teacher who dealt with the children whose homes were broken….and my impressions were naive and very limited. I simply knew that children need both parents, children need to be allowed to love their non resident parents without guilt or interference, and I knew that I wanted our home to be different.
When Les and I married, we had both been divorced for quite a while. We didn’t leave other spouses for each other, nor were former spouses even aware we were dating. That meant that bottom line, their children were marrying someone they didn’t know at all. A scary thing for parents who do not have custody of their children. We helped our former spouses understand before the wedding that we were marrying, gave pertinent information to them, and waited for the response. The response we got was not unnatural. There was fear that the children would be mistreated. There was fear of the new spouse to be’s background and proof wanted that they had clear backgrounds, (which as a matter of fact we allowed) and concerns that the new marriage would greatly affect dynamics of how we had functioned for visitation, etc.
When my exhusband remarried in February of this year, some ten years later, I remembered what it was to be the new step mom. I immediately wanted to meet or talk to the bride to be, to let her know that we had no reason to be less than friendly. After all, I am not her competition, and we would share children. The bride, however, was not particularly desiring to meet or know the exwife….me. Who could blame her…from her perspective, why would anyone not stay married to her husband to be? From her perspective, why would I have anything to say to her.But as a bride who has not had children before, there are many reasons why I am the one who can pave her path for interactions with her new step children, I have known them for 12 and 15 year respectively, and little does she know even the best of children will take advantage of situations. Not to mention things like allergies, asthma, and issues. However, meet we did and now have a neutral ground and a friendly one to work from.
New step moms seem to go one way or another. Either they think “this will be so different from what every one else experiences, because “I” am different” or “oh gosh, this is going to be tough”
Both are right.

More tomorrow.

God is good!

Rounding them Up

April 25, 2009 in A Joyful Place Called Home with 0 Comments

This week Les and I are asking for you to start rounding up the moms and step moms you know and share with them that we’re creating a resource for reading, entertainment, resources and information about being a step or blended family. We’re entering into a period of gathering the needs…yesterday we did a #hashtag on Twitter asking in six words or less the issues people were facing that day….it was interesting to see what came in (see comment with some of the responses on the previous post pasted into one comment)

What’s going on at the Berry home? The latest issues have been more about teenage stuff than step or blended family issues. We have basically three teenagers, all fiercely independent, yet still dependent upon parents to help them make decisions and definately the ones called when life goes sour. One is facing the task of learning to juggle freedom with finances while maintaining the necessary insurance payments and balancing the need to have food money. Our next son is convinced at 15 that he is fully capable of maintaining his own decisions on his life, unfortunately his belief that he is invincible hasn’t lived up to his reality when the count is down …so every now and then mom and step dad have to step in and call the boundary. Miss Priss is less than 60 days away from 13 and we can tell. Suddenly our princess of peace is more like an edgy volcano….spouting a few misfires every now and then as she learnes to juggle hormones and the pressures of being a teenager.

What are the old issues: Children who really don’t want the “step” part of the parents to ever initiate a direct “order” to do something. It really isn’t that its a step issue at all, the child will grunt, sound frustrated, or sigh that sigh that goes to the next county if the natural parent does it either. Children in a step family really like to pull out all the stops on what mileage they can use against the parental units. It’s not even about liking them in our case, the children all love their parent and step parent, its simply a “I am not submitting to authority” thing…played out in any language or focused on any person or reason they can think to blame it on.

In our family, we’ve been married for six years. We took Ron Deal’s advice and worked on letting the biological parent be the “heavy” on directives when we married each other the children were around 5,8,12, and 16, however in the real world of our family, all parents are the “every day” parent….we have custody of all of our children for most of the year, so the concept of a step dad or step mom not being able to expect to tell a child what to do, wasn’t going to fly. There are just too many times when the other parent had to be the one at home. However, we did in general and still do, let the biological parent address the issues or at least be the forward person as we both discuss something that has gone down. We work really hard on being together to discuss family issues, but there are times when the bio parent and the child or the step parent and the child simply need 1:1 time to work out their irritations peacefully.

Now if you have a solution for how you handle the teenager who doesn’t seem to connect taking off clothes/socks and the floor versus a laundry basket…let me know!

God is good!
Sweetie & Les Berry

What's the Biggest Issue You Face this week as a Step or Blended Family

April 20, 2009 in A Joyful Place Called Home with 2 Comments

Hi, my name is Sweetie Berry, I’m a step and blended family advocate and I really want to know what your biggest issue or challenge is as a step or blended family! We’ve got a team of folks ready to “plug in” to your questions and issues….so please, comment below with your issues and challenges!

The biggest challenge we’re facing right now is how to get our teenagers to do what they are asked to do without it being a “step” child issue and recognizing its simply a “I’m a child and I need to do what I’m asked” issue.

What’s your challenge this week?

Creating A New Family Tradition….

April 11, 2009 in A Joyful Place Called Home with 0 Comments

Step and Blended families have all kinds of challenges where holidays are concerned. If its not visitation, its guilt over not having visitation. Holidays can bring added stress to a new or continuing step or blended family. In America we tend to paint a picture that all families are “Norman Rockwell” moment families. The truth is that all families are different and what is “normal” in one is not “normal” for the next.

Our family found traditional holidays to be really a taxing time. A large extended family on both sides made the children feel torn between loyalties to original parents and new parents….and often the holiday was a gut wrenching, guilt overtoned period….a no win situation for them no matter what was happening. Early on, my ex husband and I made an agreement to try to let the children have both of us….without guilt. Easter is traditionally a time the children are home for the weekend. Christmas is a bigger deal for his family, so my gift to them is to let the children go each year.

The truth for us is that we needed our own alternately timed family traditions in our blended family. We do specific things each year at specific times give or take a week due to sports or visitation….to celebrate us as a family too and the one who made US! Easter egg hunts have nothing to do with Easter…but in our Southern heritage, they have a lot to do with gathering up friends and relatives and enjoying good times together! We have often hosted a city wide Easter egg hunt in our rural town….and the activities such as stuffing the eggs and dying the others were reason enough to have multiple age grouped parties to share the adventures! These giving to the city parties allowed us to step outside outselves and share our labors with others….always a good thing for a blended family…to unite for a common cause!

God bless you this Easter! I am thankful we did not have a tornado come through our home yesterday though the hail and storms were tough enough! God loves you and enjoy His Resurrection Sunday!

The Best Taco Soup Ever!

April 9, 2009 in A Joyful Place Called Home with 0 Comments

Taco Soup

1 lb. ground round crumbled and browned
2 cans petite diced tomatoes
3 cans of beans (I use 1 black bean, 1 kidney bean and one of the husband pleasin’ variety)
2 cans beef broth
1 small can diced green chilies
1 can corn (I like the mixed white and yellow)
2 packages of your favorite taco mix
Mix all in a large soup pot and simmer 30 minutes before serving. Serve with warm tortillas and butter.

Last Saturday night after the wedding, we drove to my Aunt Rose’s home in Tulsa. We had the most delicious soup that every.single.member of our family loved that was present. I thought I would share it with you today!

hugs!
Sweetie

Teaming Together

April 4, 2009 in A Joyful Place Called Home with 0 Comments

This evening was our oldest daughter’s wedding day….and a beautiful evening it was! One of the best parts of our remarriage was the decision to choose to work together to parent our children….not every ex wife and current wife choose to be polar in positioning, Kimberly’s mom and I sat together on the front row of the wedding, cried together and have reared our children together….today, both of our families were seamlessly one as we came together to celebrate our daughter/stepdaughter’s wedding day….and I am so thankful we have chosen to work through the tough times to be this way with one another….after all…we are ALL her family! Each of us our own role in her life and all of us love and want the best for her!
May God bless their union and give them grace and peace in their household forever.
God is good!
Sweetie

What Perceptions Do You Face?

March 29, 2009 in A Joyful Place Called Home with 0 Comments

For many years as an educator, I wrestled with the forms at the beginning of school. The school forms we filled out for each child were not very forth coming with the true picture of who the child was reared by at home as adults in their lives. The form asked for one mother, one father, or guardian. Not a very adequate data form for the majority of step and blended families in today’s families. In my own children’s lives, there is one mother and step dad they live with, and one step mom and natural father who is in another state. In an emegency, the number will go to a neighbor, for our families are 400 miles away. I have a friend who for safety reasons need the schools and organizations to know who NOT to let pick up her children on the forms. Communication is necessary! While the out of state parents cannot perhaps run in an emergency to the school, or maybe don’t have the legal right to. They are absolutely VERY important in our children’s lives. They want to know the school website, the passcode entries for newsletters, conferences, and special events. Online gradebooks can be accessible to all. Including your child’s other parents on emails, mail outs, and notifications helps keep our children close to both of us. It can also be used as ammunition to attack each other. Please, let all try to move past that stage! Now it’s not always my favorite thing for a child’s natural dad to know the “ammo” of what is not right in my life with a child. Whether it is too many tardies, although the child arrives at school 15 minutes early, or a poor grade on an online report card, we have to keep the focus on the child, and not just analyze and criticize each other’s parenting. The reverse is true too, sometimes distance makes connecting the dots of parenthood easier to focus. My younger children’s dad noticed that after lunch one of ours was simply doing poorly each year, so we changed what that child had for choices after lunch as well as provided longer acting allergy meds for his heavy allergies. Within six weeks it made a real difference in how that child’s day went at school.
What changes would you like to see organizations and/or churches do to make organizations and churches more inclusive to our children’s lives? We’re collecting issues and how or if you’ve resolved it. Please share your experiences or comments below. My passion is helping organizations and churches learn new perceptions on how to help make a joyful place called home happen, especially for those of us in Step and Blended families. Communication is often the key, whether its changing a form’s data, understanding the need for flexible programming requirements, or what have you. Whether its limiting the absences to participate on weekend ball teams or form changes needed in clubs. Let’s share our voice and our comments on what you are facing that isn’t inclusive to all members of your families! There are things to be said and appropriate leaders are listening!

A New Set of Rules

March 28, 2009 in A Joyful Place Called Home with 0 Comments

Do you have experiences where your child/children had to choose whether or not to participate or were not allowed to participate in sports/church/clubs because scheduling visitation does not allow for their participation. One of the more serious issues for our family when we began as a step family, was to face sports seasons. Our local coaches felt if you missed two practices you were off the team. Our children’s natural dad lived 70 miles away and only saw them on alternate weekends. Every baseball season we’d make 5 practices during the week, but by about the 3rd weekend my child would be very torn regarding practice vs time with his dad. Of course, DAD won, but son lost. He would have to choose…and in that choice miss something very important to a little boy….his baseball season.
We feel strongly that organizations do need the respect of attendance for teams and groups one commits to, but children are children and should not have to choose between parent time and group time. They have lose enough in losing an original family, why should it be set up so they lose more? We have had the same tough choices for youth camps with their Sunday school group, concerts prepared for but never participated in because there was only one weekend performance, and youth church programs that always met on weekend nights only when they were gone.
We, as a church, have to stop and realize that there are all kinds of families that cannot do Sunday night only activities. Workers that do shift work cannot take off Sunday shifts, we must learn to offer worship experiences at all times in our often empty buildings. Night workers, emergency workers, hospital staffs, all need time with God and corporate worship too!
Share with us your time/organizational struggles with your own step or blended families….we’re being asked to tell the real stories and we need them to tell!

God is God! He is good!

A Crooked Path

March 22, 2009 in A Joyful Place Called Home with 0 Comments

When Les and I were divorced, we didn’t have the “free ticket out of Dodge” experience. We had both been through gut wrenching endings of our marriages. It wasn’t a pretty time, or experience for either of us, no one rejoices over a broken marriage or broken family. Our stories and brokenness were almost the same, years before we met each other, and 400 miles a part…..We had both sought family as we both desired our homes to be a God centered place with family who would be together forever, not have the pain of not one, but two divorces each….and the disillusionment that goes with shattered dreams, broken hearts, and horrifying realities financially of what happens when your life falls apart. God had a plan to restore our lives even in the ashes of marriages destroyed…..Even eight years ago, Les nor I would have imagined that God could fix our broken worlds.

In Les’s history was an unwanted divorce as his first wife left him and his children were young and it was hard. Later, a marriage to a young woman who had a son that Les reared as a step dad and only dad from the time he was one until he was six. Seeking solutions, Les and his second wife married entirely too fast, the hard part of healing had not been allowed to be done…they were both in a rush to find sanctuary in a new life with a new partner. Unfortunately it takes time to heal and to learn to identify the brokenness, and God has to grow you through your scars. The second wife was young, and perhaps too young to handle all the life that her unexpected pregnancy as a teen to a boy and later adulthood and parenthood at 18 had brought her. When she and Les met when she worked in a business at 19, she not only became his wife, but immediate step mother and mother of 3 children at 19. One who was only years younger than herself Can.you.imagine how hard on a 20 year old to be stepmom to a two young children AND your year old son, while working full time? After five years she left, too many differences, too much on a young girl’s plate that she wasn’t prepared for, she didn’t want to do church, or God…for the life of the single partying girls looked so much more appealing, she wanted to be young and single, and without reservation, or very much warning, she chose to leave Les and the children. Because her child was not his biological child, from the day his ex wife left him, he was never allowed to see that child again. Five years of loving a baby and then without warning to never see him again. This is something that hurts his heart still. Attempts were made when we did marry some years later in 2002-2003 to reconnect at least for communication, but the mom involved preferred not. She had every legal right to do so…for Les was not her son’s biological father. However as a mom and teacher, my heart breaks for the child who was literally torn from the only dad he knew without warning or choice. His mom, who is not the bad guy of this story, simply felt that she would one day get on with her life, and didn’t want him torn three ways when and if a new step dad entered their lives. However this didn’t stop the anger and upset that the child experienced when he was the one who sacrificed part of his support system…the only dad he knew. And it didn’t stop the once again lesson for our stepchildren who learned that nothing is permanent and people do stop loving you and leave you. A difficult experience for any child to see parents choose to leave them.

Divorce is simply hard. God is a God of love, and in His attempts to keep us safe in that love, He has told us that we are to forgive, to live in peace, to end strife in our homes. When His commands are broken, the results in all the players lives are devestating. The pain can literally shape a family for generations! Our children are scarred from the pain of divorce. They have had to face harder lives and more complex family structures because their parents could not work together to stay married. It doesn’t matter if one parent or the other acted out more publically in the divorce, the truth is each person is 100% responsible for their half of a marriage ending….for forgiveness and grace through God is available even for those who mess up, and yet we choose often to go our seperate ways.
We both led single lives and painful recoveries from divorce. I simply wasn’t ever going to risk another marriage when my marriage to the children’s father ended after a very difficult marriage and continual distance in our actual time together in one home. For the last five years of our marriage, we had lived most of the time seperately, and things had not been well since before Madison’s birth. No one could have prepared me that God had a plan for another life for me. I certainly wouldn’t have believed you if you had told me that God would send a man from Oklahoma through friends on the internet and he would become my husband. Our seventh anniversary will be June 14, 2009. God had another plan for both of our lives. Our experiences, hurts, and scars you see have become a new thing in Christ. Christ has restored our family, restored our wholeness and given us a Divine gift of restoration as he promised to the sons of Abraham if we would be obedient to his calls. We are in no way “there” but God has drawn us into a love affair with Him, He has restored our dreams of a life long love with each other, and he is healing our families. Would I have chosen the path that my life has taken in divorce, single parenting, and now remarriage? Absolutely not, but I would have had no other way than to allow God to use the pain, suffering, and shame that I brought on myself than to let the Potter squash what I had so clumsily made of my life, and see His hand upon our lives as grows our family into something beautiful. It is our deepest prayer that in coming here, others will find acceptance, assistance, and a shared path of walking out this step and blended family life, and through God’s grace, grow closer to Him.

God is good! He is ever present in our daily lives!
Sweetie

Visitation: Making the Transitions

March 16, 2009 in A Joyful Place Called Home with 0 Comments

Every step or blended family has its own visitation issues. Whether your family has supervised visits, transfers to the other household, or shared custody, learning to deal with transitions is important.
Visitation is not just a time for your children to see their other parents, family, and extended networks, its a time of transition for them. They face changes in homes, rules, expectations and possessions. We used to call the time before and after the visits “toxic time” because the children when little would get overly excited and coming home they were usually over tired. The transition time for our children to return to the guys we knew and loved would vary from 3 hours to 2 days. Our children were always glad to get home, but had wonderful times with their dad and grandparents. Likewise, there were days they simply didn’t want to go to one house or the other because something was happening at the other location, they love all of us and we try not to make our divorce continue to seperate them from their other parent(s) and extended families.
As much as possible, we try to allow our children to make it to things and events that are important to them with the other parent. When we lived in the same 100 mile area we invited all of our children’s family to events that they participated in. Now that we are 400 miles away, we plan carefully the schedules and make sure big games like homecoming and playoffs are planned for well in advance. We listen and ask about dates in Arkansas that need to be planned for so our children aren’t left out of family gatherings, whether or not its “their” weekend or time. The children’s needs must rank over the legal paperwork when it comes to co parenting. Boundaries are there for the days we cannot agree, but we work very hard to continue to try to work together to co parent our children….and there have been many many hard days.
Whether the transition be polite or hostile, the children’s needs must be handled. My ExH has gone through periods where he didn’t see, hear, or speak to me personally when we met on the 1/2 point for weekend visitation. It made me furious sometimes (which was probably the point) but you see “I” am the only one who can make me furious…so its MY boundary that has to be considered, do I really need to allow his issues to be mine? Likewise, I’ve had weeks when I had to have someone with me to prevent a strife blow up when we met to exchange the children. Even other times we had to have 3rd party folks pick up the children and drop them off at the meeting location. The point is you never stop trying to create peace, you define boundaries when you have to legally if its unsafe for the children, but you keep trying and moving forward each time you can create a new level of peace among you! Children need all of us. Their other parents are 1/2 of them…and as far as safely possible, we need to let them have all of us.
The children need all of us, as much as we’re able to allow it, allow your children emotional space to make transitions, plan a calm coming home time and careful meals so not to sugar them up when they are already tired and emotionally strung out from the weekend or visit. We like to make sure the children call to let the other parent know we arrived safely, its common courtsey…and we do travel to bring them home. Being close to their other parent doesn’t take away your closeness to them….it just allows them to have their parents.

God is good….

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