Most Stepfamilies Are Not ‘The Brady Bunch’

In the background was Joy’s biological daughter, now 25. “She just wanted to be so much a part of the other two, but she was the third wheel,” Joy says.

Randy says he sometimes felt torn apart, trying to please Joy and the girls.

“During the first three years of their marriage, Joy and Randy argued about the kids. Then they had their issues to work out as a couple. They continued to receive counseling and support through their church’s stepfamily groups and have told their story to other remarried couples to offer them guidance and the wisdom of their experiences. There were several times we almost didn’t make it,” Randy says. “Just the stress and the frustration, Joy would say, ‘I will always love you, but I can’t stay in this anymore.'”

“There have been times of much more intense grief over it than I would say currently,” Joy says of the relationship with their children. “But there’s always an undercurrent of grief. It’s almost like a sore muscle that doesn’t ever heal.”

‘THE PIECES TO PEACE’

Therapist Gordon Taylor and his wife, Carri, a communications trainer and executive/personal coach, have been married since 1986. Gordon brought three sons from a previous marriage into the relationship, while Carri came with her two daughters.

Over the years, the Taylors have worked with the Baxters and other couples in their quest to help their remarriages endure the challenges of stepfamilies and to thrive in a loving environment. The Taylors speak about stepfamilies nationally and have created a DVD series titled “Designing Dynamic Stepfamilies: Bringing the Pieces to Peace.”

Before considering remarriage, couples need to know what they’re about to take on, the Taylors say. Who will be the disciplinarian? How will the finances be handled? How will former spouses and biological parents affect the new marriage and how prepared are couples for that situation? How much have the remarried couple educated themselves about stepfamily dynamics? Those and other questions need to be answered before venturing into a new marriage, they say.”If they can’t handle these (issues) before they get married, then chances of them handling it after they get married are very low,” Gordon says.

Couples need to get to know who they are as individuals and partners before entering into marriage again. Pre-marital counseling and support groups can help couples prepare for the issues that will arise, they say. One factor remarried couples need to understand is that to some extent their relationship as husband and wife will seem to become secondary to the needs of the children.

The kids need stability first to be able to deal with their parents’ new relationship. And both of the spouses need to understand that, particularly if one of them doesn’t bring children into the marriage.”Realizing we will get our time can bring hope,” Carri advises remarried couples. “In fact, we’re getting to learn about each other as we’re walking through the tough times.”

Communication and conflict resolution are keys to keeping a remarriage intact, the Taylors say. Communication is a learned skill that’s needed to handle issues. Without communication and the ability to resolve conflicts skillfully, couples fight and defend their point of view instead of collaborating and finding ways to move forward.

Like the Baxters, Gary Brattain and his wife, Elaine, sought help from the Taylors at different periods over the years to resolve issues that arose as they tried to blend their two families into one. Gary went through years of counseling to discover why his previous marriages failed and to help his 15-year marriage to Elaine thrive. “You get divorced for a reason,” says Gary, 55, of Brea, Calif. “When you get married more than once, the problem is that you’re bringing in all the baggage from the past marriages.”

That personal investigation has helped him understand who he is and how his background and upbringing have affected his relationships with his children, stepchildren, Elaine and former spouses.

YOURS, MINE, OURSDespite the challenges they’ve confronted, the Baxters and Brattains say they’ve created strong, extended families in ways they never expected. When Randy’s older daughter needed help taking care of her baby, Randy, Joy and Randy’s ex-wife put aside any differences they had and worked together to make sure she had their support.”You can move through this,” Joy says, offering advice to other stepfamilies. “You can work together as a collaborative parental group for the betterment of your kids.”

Joy and Randy’s ex-wife have even talked to groups about dealing with ex- and current spouses when couples remarry. Joy and Randy also have created new family traditions with his ex. “We celebrate all of our holidays together, including her birthday, my birthday,” he says, admitting that the situation was awkward at first.

And the girls have forged a relationship with one another. When Joy’s daughter was married in June 2006, Randy’s younger daughter was her maid-of-honor and Randy gave her away. “There is a closeness there,” he says. “It’s not like they’re estranged in anyway.”

“Many couples who remarry embark on the relationship as if it were their first time saying I do,” says Elizabeth Einstein, a marriage and family therapist in Ithaca, N.Y. Her Web site, stepfamilyliving.com, offers advice to remarried couples and their children. Such couples are often unprepared, she says. “They carry a trio of ‘uns’ into their remarriage. … unresolved grief, unrealistic expectations and uninformed adults.”

Unresolved grief can happen when couples remarry too soon after ending their previous marriages, says Einstein, co-author of “Strengthening Your Stepfamily” (Impact Publishers, $17.95). They haven’t done the emotional and psychological work to find out what went wrong with their previous marriage or to grieve the death of a partner. “Whatever people don’t resolve gets dragged into this new family as emotional baggage,” she says.

Sometimes, even if adults examine the reasons for the failure of their previous marriage through counseling, for example, they don’t include their children, she says. Children need to grieve, too, and when they don’t, that can lead complications when a new stepparent enters their lives. Troubles also can arise because of a couple’s unrealistic expectations, Einstein says. Couples may have an ideal image of a family in which stepsiblings get along like Marcia and Greg Brady did after the bunch settled into their split-level ranch-style house.

A husband and his new wife may think that they’ll form a united front to discipline the children, for example. But that doesn’t always happen because biology can have a tighter hold on parents — particularly if they feel guilty about the breakup of their previous marriage and the effect the split has had on the children. Rude awakening Joy Baxter thought her experiences as a child of divorce would help her bond with her two stepdaughters.

But the girls weren’t interested. Until Joy came along, the girls had formed a closer relationship with their father, Randy. When Joy and Randy were married, the roles changed and his daughters probably thought they were losing their father, she says. “They really didn’t care what my experiences were,” she says, “so my wisdom was, ‘OK, so much for that.'”

Seemingly minor steps Joy took in her new home life led to problems. “She redecorated and moved furniture around the house as she took on the role of mother and wife. That went over, like, forget it,” Joy says. Then, there was her husband’s mail. She went to open it one day and her older stepdaughter, who’d become her father’s confidant until his marriage to Joy, told her she couldn’t. “It’s my dad’s,” Joy remembers her saying.

“That was just something I didn’t get into with her,” she says. “That’s something her dad handled.”

From the beginning, Elaine and Gary Brattain said their kids — his two sons and one daughter and her son and daughter — in their own need to survive the situation probably didn’t know or care about the challenges their parents faced. Their family backgrounds and parenting styles were different. They grappled with lingering issues about previous relationships. They struggled with financial burdens, such as alimony and child support, brought on by previous divorces.Like a death or other major loss in life, it took several years after their divorces and then their remarriage for the Brattains and their children to begin healing.”We weren’t going to lie to them about anything, the realities of how difficult life and marriage are,” Elaine says. “I think they got a lot of security from that. Our motivation tended to lean towards, ‘this isn’t just about us … it’s about the other people, the kids and the family system that you’re marrying into,” Gary says. A photo shows a baseball team in the making as the family has grown over the years.

The Brattains now have 10 grandchildren, three daughters-in-law and two sons-in-law. (A few months after the picture was taken in 2003, Gary’s son, Joel, died while serving in Iraq.) “We’ve invested a lot in kind of identifying things,” Gary says. “What makes it work is probably commitment.”