My wife has a bio daughter, I have a bio son and bio daughter. We are in a blender…I mean blended and it has been hard.
My children’s birth mom left when they were 3 & 4. Then she allowed my second ex-wife to adopt them. Then I divorced my 2 ex wife a couple of years after that for infidelity. Throw in two deployments to Iraq and one to Afghanistan and you have my very blended children.
My wife’s daughter went to preschool one day….and while she was gone her father committed suicide with a pistol…while my wife was in the next room.
We have a ‘baby’ that is now a middle child, and an only child that is a ‘baby’ of three siblings.
We have the fragments of our left over families…all trying to be fair to some extent without the emotional energy to really love all of our children…some do really well, and some don’t even try.
The love and determination of my soul mate and I seem to be the winning factor in it all. We are determined that our kids are going to overcome their emotional development problems. By this I mean that we have had our children in counseling, they journal almost daily, we recently enrolled them in FOCUS
We have decided to disallow my bio children visiting their birth mom anymore (she has no custody rights) because she utterly spoils them for a week and sends them home rotten. We have decided to watch my parents with the children because they favor my bio daughter and exclude the other two children. We trust our children implicitly with the late-husband’s parents even thought the only one related is my wife’s bio daughter.
it sounds troubling and complex, but the good news is that we completed our second successful family meeting this last week and it went really well. The girls have a focus appointment this week.
We adults have issues too of course…I completed 12 weeks of counseling a few months ago upon receiving my diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis and am planning to enroll in some more counseling soon, my wife is currently going to counseling every week. We work almost daily on pushing our family uphill to where we want it to be. The imaginary place where home is a safe place where we can do more than just survive…where we can each thrive.