Guest Blog: Building a Stepfamily

Welcome to the Tuesday guest blog. Every Tuesday, "On Balance" features the views of a guest writer. It could be your neighbor, your boss, your most loved or hated poster from the blog, or you! Send me your entry (300 words or fewer) for consideration. Obviously, the topic should be something related to balancing your life.

Stepfamily Balancing Act

by Anne Burt, the editor of My Father Married Your Mother: Writers Talk about Stepparents, Stepchildren, and Everyone in Between (including an essay by me). Anne's essays and fiction have appeared on NPR's "All Things Considered" and "Talk of the Nation" and in Salon, Working Mother, and The Christian Science Monitor. Anne lives with her husband, daughter and stepdaughter in Montclair, N.J.

My second husband and I both have six-year-old girls. Just a few months ago, I returned to work full time. My new job (which brings in the health insurance and 401K) requires a commute of 90 minutes each way. Since my husband works locally, the responsibilities of school transporter, homework monitor, dog feeder, grocery shopper, and dinner prepper have fallen largely on him.

Here's the wrinkle: My daughter lives with us 100% of the time; his daughter 50%. His daughter attends school in the town where her mother lives. On the mornings his daughter stays with us, my husband packs both girls up (I'm gone by 7 a.m.), drives to the next town, then hightails it back home to get my daughter onto her school bus on time. He performs the reverse commute in the evenings.

Before my return to work, we had an unspoken division of labor centered around which children slept in the house on any given night. When my daughter was here alone, I was in charge of all child-related duties. We shared duties when both girls were here. On the occasional night my daughter visited her father and my stepdaughter was here, I retreated into the background.

Those days are gone. I have to say that so far, we're a closer family for the change. I never want to retreat when I'm home because I miss the hours I've lost with the girls; as a result, my stepdaughter and I have greater intimacy. I worried that my husband (or my daughter) might dislike his having to care for my child more often than he cares for his own, or that my stepdaughter might feel jealous. I underestimated everyone.

On the heels of my divorce six years ago, my daughter clung to me, fearing that if her father could move away, maybe I could, too. Now that she knows her stepfather is reliable, she seems to accept that although I leave in the morning, I always come home at night.

How do other working stepfamilies handle the delicacies of childcare when there's a mix of his, hers, ours, theirs? What are the upsides and the downsides? I'd love to hear more.

By Leslie Morgan Steiner |  May 30, 2006; 9:00 AM ET  | Category:  Division of Labor , Guest Blogs
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