Too Fast, Too Furious
I've gone from a life of glossing through Vogue and doing anything I damn well please, to one that revolves around step-parenting books and meticulous editing of my own personality.
Living with a partner who has children can be a very daunting, tricky affair; especially if you don't have kids of your own to begin with, and the family you're injected into contains preadolescents.
I've had a very difficult first week with my new loot, which ended in Oyster Boy and I having our first epic fight. Even in the thick of screaming, crying and crazed pacing around the bedroom (couldn't pace downstairs because the kids were around, couldn't get out of the apartment because we agreed on a never-leave-the-house-during-a-fight policy), I never languished in the thought of quitting. I hope I never will be seduced to, hence my current obsession over coping literature on how to survive in blended families.
Some takeaways from Stepmonster: A New Look at Why Real Stepmothers Think, Feel and Act the Way We Do :
"By ignoring problems with his kids' behavior and adjustment -- a disease to which every father who divorces and re-partners seems prone -- he leaves the woman in an unenviable position, with a few equally unappealing options: she can fend for herself, feeling unsupported; tell the man something about his child that he may hear as criticism; or go silent."
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"Those of us who come into our stepkids' lives when they are preadolescents or adolescents will, experts such as psychologist E.Mavis Hetherington tell us, have the hardest time of all, but not necessarily because of anything we do. The development imperative of the adolescent, researchers who study stepfamilies explain, is to separate, while the stepmother and her partner are likely feeling the imperative to blend. So when a family is forming at just this moment in a child's life, it gives new meaning to the concept of being at cross-purpose..."