Even when stepparenting is hard, you gotta make time for fun
I'm a fun-loving, mischievous kind of person. I like to mess with people. Teasing is my love language. And I especially like playing with kids, who are the most fun to tease and mess with.
...except my stepdaughter, who is apparently my kryptonite.
Turns out, if your main way of interacting with kids is by playing and having fun and messing around, and your stepkid is dead set against having fun with you, you hit a big ol' brick wall.
Soooo… how are you supposed to bond with a stepkid who’s determined to reject you? Is there any way to still enjoy being a stepparent?
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Losing yourself in the stepparenting role
I thought I had pretty realistic expectations about dating someone with a kid, especially since I already had a kid of my own the same age. I didn’t expect to become besties with my stepdaughter overnight. I anticipated her hesitance and distance; I figured some jealousy and uncertainty were probably normal. I was totally okay with taking things slow and respecting her comfort level.
So out of respect, every time my SD refused to smile when I cracked a joke, I pulled back a little. I'd make a mental note that wasn't the right way to connect with her, and I'd retreat to figure out some other way to connect instead. The next time I'd try a milder joke. A gentler approach. Adjust my wording. Change my tone.
Nada.
Again and again and again I'd try to win my stepkid over. She kept her wall built so solid and so high, you'd think I was the Night King coming at her with my horde of ice zombies instead of a reasonably nice, normal lady her dad was dating.
I carved so much of my personality away in my attempt to create a version of myself my stepdaughter would like and approve of, I lost myself. I hollowed my personality out till I didn't recognize what was left. I forgot who I used to be. Fun was no longer anywhere to be found.
And no wonder, when I had to exist around SD only conditionally — act this way, not that way. Be less… well, myself. Minimize and shrink whatever it was about me that she didn’t like. Make myself into a version of myself she could accept, regardless of what that might look like or cost me.
Over time, when aspects of your personality are continually shunned by those around you, you shut those parts of yourself down. Even when that someone is your stepkid. I started dreading transition days because I knew SD’s visitation time with us meant having to watch every single thing I said, every conversation taking place on eggshells. I felt awkward and inhibited, constantly second-guessing myself.
I’d bite my tongue all day, then at night lie awake replaying every mistake I made and wondering how I could fix it the next day. No matter what I tried, my stepdaughter rejected me, and every rejection chipped more of my self-esteem into sawdust.
Somehow I'd gone from being a spontaneous gal who knew how to have a good time to someone who obsessed endlessly over the umpteen possible outcomes of every single interaction, then worked her way backwards from those predictions to decide what carefully measured response to give.
And even then, none of my oh-so-careful personality adjustments worked to actually help me connect with my stepdaughter.
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finding the fun in your stepfamily
Even on our very best days, blended family life is hard. There's the stress of wanting to create positive memories as a family, the pressure for everyone to get along when you only get about a minute and a half together, and the normal day-to-day chaos of custody schedules and soccer practice and homework. To that end, there's about a million blog posts out there on how to manage stress/expectations/conflict in blended families. Heck, I’ve written a bunch of them myself.
But amid all that frenzied, well-meaning advice, I’ve never seen a single reminder to laugh.
If I could only pick one thing I hated about my earliest years as a stepmom, it's how serious everything felt all the damn time. Like the entire future of our family depended on my next word choice, or whether SD said good morning to me, or whether her mom flipped out over something I did or didn't do. Like every day I was walking on a tightrope strung out over hot lava. In the dark. While having no idea how to actually balance on a tightrope, terrified one misstep would incinerate everything. Don't trip! #nopressure
These are not conditions that lend themselves super well to having fun.
And yet, the tightrope was of my own making. I could've stepped off to safety at any time — I just didn't know it.
Disengaging helped me reclaim my lost pieces. Stepping back helped me remember there was a difference between compromising and compromising myself— and I stopped doing the latter. I understood that not every joke works with every crowd, but to just not joke at all, because SD was determined to remain miserable? No. I was done with that. That wasn't me.
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I wasn't (and still am not) responsible for how SD chose to interact with me. (I'm fun, dammit! How did I let a grouchy 10yo brainwash me into thinking I wasn't??) We're only responsible for our own actions, not for other people's responses to those actions. And we can't control how anyone acts toward us or what they think about us. We only think we can.
I thought my stepkid didn't like me because of how I interacted with her, and thought I could get her to like me if I acted differently. So I acted differently. Which didn't work. So then I acted a different differently, then again and again until I became unrecognizable even to myself. And life became so serious as to become unrecognizable, too.
Instead of a stepfamily, I found myself living in a slowly collapsing claustrophobic nightmare.
The antidote? Be yourself. Rediscover what being yourself feels like — wholly, unapologetically, completely yourself. The serious will begin breaking apart and the fun will start shining back through. You'll find space to breathe again. And once you can breathe, you can remember how to laugh again, too. Because honestly? Sometimes this shit is so, so ridiculous. The double standards between houses, the ex’s constant shenanigans, these stepkids who act so sulky they’re practically like a caricature of sulky kids… seriously, if we don’t laugh, we’ll cry.
Or if it's all too hard right now, too painful and awful, then go ahead and cry. Absolutely. And after a couple days or a couple weeks, when you're feeling less raw, start searching for laughter again.
Dan and I say all the time that if we could do everything over again, we'd laugh more.Clear out some room for silliness and goofing around. Give good times together the same weight we gave to house rules and court documentation and lengthy discussions with the kids, and with the same degree of advance planning and follow-through.
Look for the fun. If there's no laughter to be had, invent some. Find joy in every conflict-free minute, whenever that minute occurs. If there is only one single calm and happy moment in a 48-hour whirlwind of visitation time, then celebrate the shit out of that moment... and let the rest go.
