Wednesday Martin

Jacquelyn Fletcher, author of A Career Girl’s Guide to Becoming a Stepmom, has a fantastic guest post on my psychologytoday.com blog today. Check it out

www.psychologytoday.com/blog/stepmonster

Do the impending holidays have you feeling extra stressed? You’re not alone. At holiday time, stepfamilies may deal with issues–kids in loyalty binds “boycotting” dad and stepmom; an unsupportive ex reneging on a holiday schedule; couples feeling splintered by his excitement to see the very kids who might be hostile and rejecting toward her–that first families don’t even have to think about. And stepmom–the culturally-designated “blending agent” of the stepfamily–is likely to feel the pressure most of all.

Check out my article on Psychology Today, and leave a comment about your own holiday experiences as a woman married to (or partnered with) a man with kids (you’ll have to cut and paste)

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/stepmonster/200911/why-are-there-two-turkeys-happy-holidays-stepfamilies

Are you a New Jersey or New York City stepmom, stepfamily member, or just curious about stepfamily life? Come listen to my talk at the JCC of the Palisades this Thursday evening!

http://jccotp.org/category.aspx?catid=94

Please check out my latest post on psychologytoday.com about the custody battle between Sandra Bullock, Jesse James, and his ex Janine Lindemulder

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/stepmonster/200911/pornstar-mom-superstar-stepmomwhat-about-dad

Susan Wisdom, author of Stepcoupling, wrote a guest post on my Psychology Today blog today. Hope you’ll have a read…and leave a comment:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/stepmonster/200911/teens-can-drive-you-nuts-especially-when-theyre-not-yours

I would love your thoughts on my new piece on stepmothering for the Huffington Post: please post a comment!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wednesday-martin/when-and-why-you-shouldnt_b_343135.html

Please check out my latest post on Psychology Today: “Why is Stepmothering a Feminist Issue?” Leave a comment!

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/stepmonster/200911/what-makes-stepmothering-feminist-issue

Hi Readers, You know how I love Martin Babits, L.C.S.W., and author of The Middle Ground: A Couple’s Guide to Renewing Your Relationship (http://www.amazon.com/Power-Middle-Ground-Renewing-Relationship/dp/1591026628/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256606628&sr=8-1). Marty is a divorced dad, and here’s what he has to say about a recent very important project–building a wall in his apartment once things got serious with his partner. The wall is going up today! Read the piece–and then leave a comment letting Martin know what you think of what he’s doing:

It’s been four years since the divorce that ended my 27 year marriage. How and why it happened is a story I’ll tell you some other time. My son, knowing that it is not even a remote possibility, is rooting for his mom and I to get back together. He has tried to persuade me to limit the length of my dating to six weeks per dating partner. “After that,” he counsels,” you’ve got to find someone else and start again., dad.” So now that I am having a relationship with a woman, a woman I am crazy about, and have been seeing for well beyond the six week stint that he approves, I get considerable bristling and growling in response to mostly everything, mostly everyday. He avoids her at every turn. Before she’s been invited into the picture in any formal sense, he’s invited her out.

You should know that, up to now, I’ve had no privacy in my post-divorce living space. My bed is set down in a combination living and dining room area. It’s large enough to separate into two rooms but I haven’t built a divide. Why didn’t I put a wall up? Probably because I’ve felt guilty about not being able to shield my son from the pain of the divorce. So with no wall, I’m on 24/7 call. I’ve been focused on making him feel how important he is to me. Whenever I think of moving on, the following question dogs me: “How can you bring a new person into your living situation (my son lives with me) against his vehement opposition?” This is where I have been stuck.

Wednesday Martin, like the good friend that she is to all her readers, helped me reason this through. Reason, not as in Archimedes’ principle, I’m talking about heart-reason, emotional logic. Stepmonster helped me understand that by living without a private space for myself, I was sending my son a confusing and essentially untrue message: that time was standing still. Also, he had a room with a door. Was I telling him – by my actions – that his needs trumped mine? That’s not how I want him to understand me; it benefits neither of us. We both have to learn to take care of ourselves.

Children of divorce, probably universally, harbor fantasies of their parents reuniting. Having no wall invites him to misinterpret what I am doing and feeling. It is of form of colluding with him by allowing the fantasy of parental reunification to comfortably flourish. As his dad, I realize that he needs to accept that the ending of my romantic relationship with his mother has already occurred; it is a fact rooted in the past and not to be revisited. The inevitability of my son’s need to grieve the losses he has experienced as a result of the divorce – and the fact that the divorce marked the finale of his childhood – amount to a double assault on his sense of security; two tough blows, two rough psychological truths that he must learn to come to terms with. Maturation is dotted with traumatic interludes. Failure to grieve brings on failure to thrive.

So the wall that marks my readiness to move forward in my life, to re-establish my need for privacy and the prospect of a life – or at least a significant portion of a life that is uninterrupted by my son and intentionally kept separate from his experience – is now appropriate. Maybe the wall is a way of walling out the past from the present; or at least walling out the predominance of the past in the present. Stalling on the wall registers as a vote of no-confidence in his (and my) learning to handle the changes in our lives. Seeing it from this vantage, I am tempted to erect a series of walls, one for each developmental juncture – in my son’s and my own past – that needs resolving. But, of course, I know the bulk of this work gets done internally. So, it’s one wall to represent them all.

I learned about Elizabeth Saitta’s work on a trip to Boston. She is an art teacher married to a man with children from a previous marriage. She recently earned her MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Her relationship with her husband and her relationship to stepmotherhood has informed Elizabeth’s work–which I love for its amazing fusion of the ethereal, the representational, and the symbolic–in fundamental ways. For her MFA thesis show (www.massartedgrad.org), she put together a powerful and thought-provoking group of works in a number of media–ink on paper and cheesecloth, wood, recycled aluminum, plaster. She’s better at discussing her work than I am so I will let her descriptions of this first piece, “Reality” (a repeated and fading image of a wedding dress) speak for themselves.

Elizabeth on “Reality” (ink on paper, 2008):
Ahhh yes….the wedding dress. Since I was about 9, I have thought and thought and thought about what my dress would look like, who I would marry, how many kids I would have, where I would live. I had so many expectations and I really believed they would all come true. The dress was my great-aunt’s. She gave it to my mom and my mom gave it to me. The dress represents the expectations of marriage that are so often handed down from generation to generation. I was happy and willing to buy into those expectations. And that is one of the things which has made it hard for me to come to grips with my situation sometimes. Things I thought I would have I will never have. I will never have a husband who has only said, “I do” to me. I will never be able to say that my husband is my husband and mine only. It is all too painfully tattooed in my mind and soul that my husband was another woman’s husband for 10 years. Sometimes that hurts me so badly, I can hardly breathe. Even just thinking of my wedding day – we went to Vegas and got married – just the two of us – I see the complication that exists when part of a step family. I wore a black shirt and shorts. No dress. And while I know it was the right decision for me and I would not have done it any other way being in the situation I’m in, it still leaves me with some pain.

I wanted to get married that way, because I wanted that day to be about my husband and me. I knew if we did a big, traditional wedding, the day would no longer be about the two of us, it would be about the four of us…me, my husband and his daughter and son. It would not have been the two of us standing up there, it would have been all four of us, pledging to be the “perfect” family. And I was not willing to sacrifice my wedding day. I would sacrifice the dress, the cake, the dancing…and I’ve continued to sacrifice a lot for my husband and my step kids….but I would not sacrifice that. Even now as I write this, I’m thinking, “Does this make me a horrible person? If someone read this, would they think I am a witch?” And you know, yes, there would be some who would think that…but oh well. They are not me and they do not know what I go through on a daily basis.

The only regrets I have are in regards to my family. I know I hurt my mom and dad very much, by going and getting married without them and as I sit here, my eyes well up, knowing I caused them pain. But I had to do what was right for me and I see now how much I have to do that as a stepmom – I am always fighting and nudging to get myself heard and make myself matter. That is why the dress in this piece fades. My reality is not the expectations of my great aunt or my mother. That can be equal parts painful and liberating.

Check out this article on Belief Net. What steps do YOU take to nurture your marriage? I’m all ears…so post a comment on belief net or my blog.
xx wednesday

http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2009/10/not-so-brady-4-rules-for-stayi.html