How are YOU going to handle the holidays?
Other women with stepkids want to know: how are you and your partner handling the holidays this year? What are your “family” or couple rituals for the holidays? Any new strategies to share? Or aggravations? What are you afraid of…and looking forward to? Sound off…post a comment!
How will you survive/celebrate the holidays?
Tags: blended family, Christmas, divorce, family holiday, holiday stress, holidays, remarriage, remarriage with children, stepchild, stepfamily, stepfamily advice, stepfamily information, stepmother, stepmothers and stress, stress during holidays, Thanksgiving
November 23rd, 2009 at 5:20 pm
I’m going to keep my step-parenting books close to hand and duck off for a quick read when things get too much.
Also, the pool (we live in Australia) is the best stepmum coping mechanism ever!
November 23rd, 2009 at 5:41 pm
I would love to have a pool or even just nice weather at this time of year. Being in the house all of us seems to make the tensions higher. This year I’m going to go for a walk after the early meal. With or without husband. Might just keep me a bit more relaxed.
November 23rd, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Wine helps with everything. Seriously I am going to try to remember to meditate. Our ritual as a couple is to go for a run together on T-giving morning before his three kids (in their twenties and still not crazy about me after ten years) show up and I’m allowed to vent on the run and then the rest of the day the deal is I’ll zip it.
This year after reading your book our agreement is that after dinner when they leave husband is going to be the one to say it if there was anything they did that was unkind so I dont have to. This year for the first time we have a motto: “We’re the team.” I’ll let you know if it works!
November 23rd, 2009 at 7:35 pm
We will go to my in-laws, and there will be 20 or so people there, which means there is always someone to talk to, someone to drink with, someone to take a walk with. I’m also returning home one day early, so I can have some (I’m sure by then, much needed) time to myself, and my husband and his kids can have some time together. I always need a vacation after my vacation, especially when the kids are around, no matter how much I love them.
November 23rd, 2009 at 9:50 pm
I must admit that I’m getting more anxious as the week wears on–as much because of the time off from school as the holiday itself. Following your advise, Wednesday, I have been stepping back a lot these past few months and letting my husband do the parenting of his 13 year old daughter (we’ve had a 50/50 split with her mom since she was 2 and until recently, her dad and I organized our lives around her schedule). For example, I’ve been scheduling knitting groups with my friends on Saturdays (when she’s with us)– this past weekend, however, her behavior was really poor. I witnessed attention seeking misbehavior while my friends were over here (really, she might as well have been 8 the way she was acting), general rudeness and sullenness, and back-talking to me. I asked for an apology for the rudeness, asked her to explain the nasty looks, and asked her father to make it clear to her that he does not like this poor treatment of me (which he did). But still, it’s like this force field of negative energy surrounds her, so that we can even tell when she gets up in the morning, it’s like the wind shifts in the house and there are emotional farts everywhere she walks.
Sorry, I know I’m off topic a bit here, but I’m looking for strategies for how my husband and I can actually survive family time–I’m not even going to look for enjoyment–in the face of this constant teen drama. We’re having Thanksgiving dinner at the home of my friend and based on her attitude last week, I’m expecting some bad behavior from her there. Suggestions, anyone? Any ideas for how to survive a week without her in school? (For example, her room could use a good cleaning and organizing–is this the time for that? or do we arrange playdates and–for the sake of our own sanity–get her out of the house as much as possible?)
November 24th, 2009 at 10:08 am
I am getting nervous because this is the first year we will be having Thanksgiving in our home. It was easy to “hide” when somebody else was in charge, but I won’t have that option this time. Everyone will be able to see if I’m sad or upset. I am inspired now to have little breaks/treats for myself to help me get through it (like some chocolate… a glass of wine… 15 min of quiet reading) AND some couples time. I want to enjoy the holiday with our family and am going to stop trying to make it perfect (because it can’t be)… thank you Wednesday Martin for catalyzing this thought process for me!!
November 24th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
My husband and I are staying home and having Thanksgiving at a nice restaurant… just the two of us. My husband’s kids disowned him years ago. It was very hurtful when it happened, but the passage of time has significantly lessened the pain. And not having to see them does allow us the freedom to really enjoy the holidays with each other.
November 24th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Kathy,
I want to respond to you here! I hope you are giving yourself credit for the fact that you are in fact surviving the most difficult of all hands a couple in a remarriage with children can be dealt–the combination of a stepmother and a pre-teen or teen girl. You are not imagining that it is tough–researchers know how combustible these situations are. Mostly they think it’s owing to the teen girl modeling the feelings and behaviors of their mothers, as teen girls tend to do. No fun.
So part one of any solution is to acknowledge and hopefully for your husband to understand that the simple fact of the matter is that this IS in fact tough, and would be no matter how wonderful and self-abnegating you were. Kudos to you and your marriage, for starters.
As for the holiday, you’re staring into the abyss of unstructured time with a teen stepchild and that is understandably daunting. A few suggestions:
1. She might be on her best behavior at your friend’s house for Thanksgiving and I think it’s brilliant that you’ll be bulwarking yourself with familiar faces who help you feel understood and supported! Teen girls often really rise to the occasion when there is a “fresh audience” and here’s hoping she surprises you in this way. She might feel very grown up and it might bring out the best in her. I’ve seen this described many times. I think kids feel a certain freedom out of the confines of their home where roles feel more embedded and inflexible.
2. how much of this can you delegate to your husband? and I mean all of it, the heavy lifting and the emotions, too. can you tell him that you just don’t like your role of worrying and stressing and ask for help here? can he be in charge of cooking for her, cleaning up after her, and arranging many, many playdates to keep her active and with her peers–the most appropriate focus for her at this developmental moment–rather than you taking any of this on?
3. I vote to delegate her bedroom to your husband. close the door if it’s filthy, don’t even look at it, don’t even think about it. every time it aggravates you, tell yourself that her room, like her bad behavior, is not your problem. you’re not responsible for how this person turns out, she wouldn’t accept your advice anyway, and your obligations are to yourself and your marriage–never a doormat be, never put your mental health or your marriage anywhere but first on your list of priorities in a situation as demanding as yours!
4. I vote for much, much time with YOUR friends during this period. how much can you get out, get away, have them over, have them buoy you, prop you up, amuse and distract you, and help you feel like an insider in your home and your life? get them over as much as possible when your stepdaughter is around.
And let me know how it goes.
best,
wednesday
November 24th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Dear Kathy,
I agree that you have to keep yourself as surrounded and “propped up” by friends while your SD is out of shcool as you can. Examples, what if you planned to do one thing with her that is low stress like go to the movies then the rest of the time is time with your girlfriends and your work and I DO think it’s so important can you do date night with your husband saying to him that you need that time alone together jus tyou and hubby? I do believe it helps and wonder would he understand without judging you for that? Is she old enough to be left alone with a friend at your place for a few hours or maybe with a friend and a sitter she can have special DVD and popcorn night with her friend and you and hubby get a few hours away together? Sorry for your stress i nearly left when my SD was this age but we got through because my husband LEARNED. happy thanksgiving, get that time iwth your GFs!
November 24th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Wednesday, I first just want to say thank you so much for your book – I found it last week and have been reading it like a demon in every spare moment I have. It is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant – and I feel that for the first time in my stepmothering experience, someone is FINALLY saying/writing what reflects and validates my experience, rather than telling me to buck up or suck it up. THANK YOU!
This holiday season will be my third as a stepmother to two teenagers (girl 17, boy 15) that live with me and my fiance full-time. In years past, each Thanksgiving or Christmas day was a horrible, crazed mad-dash between my parents’ house and his family’s house (both hours away from our house), with the result always being that I felt resentful for not having enough time with my family, doing our “family things,” and my fiance and his kids feeling the same about not having enough time to spend participating in their family traditions. This year, a bit by chance, my fiance’s family members weren’t all available on Thanksgiving, so we did early T-Day with them last Sunday – and my family will be doing something on Thanksgiving day.
A couple of things about this year’s shift have been noticeably helpful to me. First, not having to drive for hours and then shuttle between multiple households with different holiday/family cultures, and then drive for hours more to get home, has dramatically decreased my stress level. When we went to my fiance’s family’s early T-Day, I found it easier to tolerate their entrenched holiday traditions, which are alien to me – protracted board game sessions, not enough wine (!), blah food, and excessive (in my opinion) doting on all the kids that were running around. Oh, and the women doing everything while the men do nothing.
Somehow, knowing that we were devoting one day to my fiance’s family’s “way,” and anticipating being able to devote another whole day to my family’s “way,” made me much more calm and tolerant of a different holiday culture that often feels uncomfortable to me. The kids were happy – they got to spend a whole day doing what feels familiar to them – my fiance was happy, and while I won’t say that I relish the way their folks celebrate T-Day, I was generally happy because the whole experience was comparatively low-stress, and because we hadn’t set ourselves up with the expectation of having to shift among multiple households in one day. (The only really “bad” moment, which I can [almost!] find funny now, was when I leaned over to put dirty dishes in the dishwasher, and my fiance’s mom/mother-in-law-to-be came up behind me, pushed me playfully, and yelled “Put the witch in the oven!” She’s a wonderful woman who has been very candid about her love for me, but I really couldn’t help having a Hansel and Gretel wicked stepmother freak-out moment!)
Another thing that I have been more conscious about this year’s holidays: I think that in the first year, my fiance and I both really wanted the kids to love our new arrangement (though we never discussed it explicitly, and still have a very hard time doing it), and we overextended ourselves tremendously – and over-pushed the kids by extension – by trying to be all things to all families involved, make everything feel “right” or “normal” to the kids, spend too much money on Christmas gifts, etc. This post is already long enough, so I won’t go into any more background, but suffice it to say that after three years with two teenage stepkids, I have reached my limit in many ways. This year, I basically told the kids: your family does holidays one way, and my family does holidays in a totally different way. You will always be welcome at my family’s celebrations, but if you don’t like the way we celebrate, you are welcome to make other plans. I let myself off the hook around pleasing them, and I hope I’ve let them off the hook. Our Thanksgiving with my family would actually be much less nerve-wracking me for if they weren’t around (and I know that my mother actually feels the same, and more) – but if they decide to come, that is their choice, and at 15 and 17, they will have to deal with navigating a family environment that doesn’t think kids should be the center of attention all day. My family talks incessantly when we are together, wonderful conversations about culture and politics and art and all these things I/we find exciting and inspiring – and we drink wine and talk about new music and play guitar, etc…but my stepkids seem at a total loss without access to video games, Facebook, etc. If they do decide to come with us on Thursday, I doubt they will find it “fun” by their definition. But guess what? Not my problem. Realizing that has been liberating.
Best wishes to all the stepmothers out there – I hope we can all remember and honor ourselves and our partnerships this holiday season. I’m not quite there, and neither is my partner, but I hope we all will be, one day.
November 24th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
Great column and forum. You all are so lucky to have this opportunity to read others’ stories, ventilate and get advice. Thanks, Wednesday!
I agree that teenagers in stepfamilies are aloof, angry and aggravating! They so dramatically demonstrate and act out the anger/jealousy of the spurned bio mom against the stepmom. (They HAVE TO for loyalty sake.) But it’s not a pleasant place for a stepmom to be. All SM did was fall in love and promise to care for his kids respectfully …seemed like a good idea at the time. It’s a tough and thankless position to be in. I advise that when it gets rough with angry teenaged stepkids who act badly: take a deep breath, take a break, talk to youself to calm down, and IGNORE what’s happening as well as you can. It will change over time.
Happy Thanksgiving
November 24th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Thank you all, so very much, for these comments and this support. For me, what is both very perplexing and oddly reassuring about my stepdaughter’s teenagerhood is this: I have actually been an equal parent to her for the past 10 years. She literally cannot remember her life before me, and I did the whole thing: diapers, teething, potty training, midnight sickness, birthday cupcakes, valentine cards for the class, you name it. But all those years of service count for nothing in the past dozen months–it’s like they never happened! And I can’t imagine her treating me any worse if I had just married her father last month, all of those same hostilities and loyalty pulls have kicked into full gear regardless. And her rejection is incredibly, incredibly painful.
I have good reason to believe that her mother is fueling much of this and I’m working very hard to let go of my anger and pain about that (that is, for the past 10 years, while I put my life on hold for her daughter in some very substantial ways, she generally treated me like free, on-call childcare), but here’s my follow-up question: how can I detach from her mother? and not be so hooked by the situation? We have no actual ostensible relationship, the mother and I, and I don’t want one (I find her to be very inconsistent on her best days, a kind way of saying that she’s manipulative and unstable) –but I find myself still too reactive to her, she gets under my skin. I want to reclaim my autonomy, to not let this woman have emotional power over me, but when the 13 year old acts like a 13 year old, I feel that her mother in the room. Do you know what I mean?
November 25th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Kathy – I just want to offer my support, empathy, and I understanding. I raised two girls – and I can tell you that it almost doesn’t matter if you gave birth to them or not. The rejection I got from my youngest (she adored me when she was a baby) was incredibly painful. I can only tell you that most girls get through their teenage years without their moms going to prison. (That was a joke between me and my stepmother – who raised two bio daughters, me (her stepdaughter) and three stepsons. My youngest daughter is now 22 and she and I have a fabulous relationship. I am, however, very grateful that I did NOT have to go through the teenage years with my stepdaughters. I got them when they were 18 and 20
God did throw me a curve ball I was ill prepared for: My youngest stepson who is now 17. And once again, I’ll survive without being sent to prison.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Peggy
November 26th, 2009 at 2:14 am
Pearl, I’m laughing because about my second year of marriage my sister-in-law brought me a Halloween decoration that was a broom with a witches hat on top and on one side it said, “The Witch is In,” and the other said, “The Witch is Out.” She dropped it off and then called me, very worried that I might take it the wrong way. I LOVED it, as much as I love being a StepMonster, and I laughed for a long time. I loved putting the “Witch is IN” side so it showed and I remember being very proud one day when my husband’s ex- came to pick up the kids (back in the day when we spoke and she actually got out of her car and came to the door) and she saw it. I just smiled and didn’t say a word. Still laugh thinking of that. Your post helped me remember, so thanks . . .
Kathy, Wow, wow, wow . . . My stepdaughter is 21 now and I am so thrilled to see her “begin” the process of maturing, but my heart hurts for you. For me, it’s the youngest one that I bonded with and he’s 13 now. I read a long time ago that every time a child goes through another developmental milestone (13 is one of them) that they will re-examine their relationship with the stepparent and likely have more issues with acceptance. Well, despite how very much my s-son and I got along, sometimes we even said the L-word, he is in that phase now. I keep telling myself to wait, just wait, just wait, and wait some more. This will pass. We were having a discussion because he was mad about me not listening to him go on and on and on and on with a story and I wondered aloud if it had anything to do with him being mad that I didn’t belong in his life. . . and he neatly and quickly came back with, “We’re so way past that, no this is about . . . ” And, I just sat there and processed it for a minute and realized that I DO go deeply into a projection of how much he must hate me at the slightest provocation and in fact, I’m going to guess that at least 75% of the time I’m wrong. Very interesting and a good wake-up call for me.
And, I wonder if it helps a step-couple to know that a child WILL over-react, I wonder if the biological parent could just wait and not “protect” the child and not defend against the stepparent . . . if both people could just take the teen screaming, whining, crying, swearing, and whatever else is going on as just what it is . . . an over-reaction designed to get attention so the child can get what he/she wants. Hello? I wonder if that would save any parents from a huge argument afterward. It’s not a parent’s job to make life all happy and milk-toast for a kid, and in fact in their teen years they are “adrenalin-seeking” according to many of the neuropsychologists I know. If that’s true, they might be over-dramatizings just to get their emotional-adrenalin-fix. Just a thought. Might be true for some kids.
And, here I am on this site, just before I head to bed . . . one last “look-see” at everyone’s comments to go to bed with a warm heart knowing we’re all living this process the best we can. What an amazing creature a stepmother is!!!!!!!!!
November 27th, 2009 at 11:47 am
We had a very nice thanksgiving. We had friends over for a potluck. Stepkids didn’t come, by their own choice: they were with their mom.
I got worried around 8 pm though because my partner looked very sad. None of them had called him. But around 9, three of the six did. Not sure why they all called him in a row. Maybe somebody reminded them.
He’s going out for pizza with them this evening.
So, this way of doing it–we get together with friends for a meal, he goes out with kids later–seems to work for us. They don’t get an opportunity to diss me any more.
November 28th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Hope it wa s easy or sort of for you pearl! So much better not to drive everywhere all day long that is just so hectic and hellish if you ask me. also that the kids have to do it stepmom’s way sometimes, hey, it’s just fair, alternate yearly and they will learn new ways who knows maybe even “unplug” a little and learn to enjoy and if not like you said, not you’re problem.
we survived it I am happy to say, I didn’t take the bait from the s’kids and my husband did the heavy lifting I actually got to relax. hop eyou are all well and survived as well
November 30th, 2009 at 9:59 am
I hope it all went well for ALL of you. Pearl, sounds like you got some good advice here from other women and are well on your way to surviving the entire holiday season. And I must concur with Kim here that the stepmother is an amazing creature. I think we are likely to slip and backslide in our partnerships over the holiday season–the pressure brings out the worst in us all, and brings out the cracks in our relationships–but there is such thing as progress!