We all know living in a blended family can feel really friggin’ hard… and by “we” I mean stepparents and parents, aka the adults in those stepfamilies. Yet as hard as getting tossed in the same house with a bunch of strangers and their emotional baggage is for us, how much harder is it for the kids?

And I don’t mean that in a we-must-all-only-think-about-the-children-at-all-times kind of way. Instead, I’m saying let’s use that reality as incentive to get our own poop in a group: so we can better protect and support our dang kids.

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The effects of being a stepchild

There’s no question that my stepdaughter’s life immediately took a nosedive when her dad started dating me. Dan was her safe haven away from her emotionally abusive mother, the one place where SD didn’t have to balance on volatile eggshells.

Then I came along and made everything super complicated for her with my brand-new eggshells! Suddenly she wasn’t sure how she was allowed to act around her dad anymore. For example, I wasn’t okay with her slapping him across the face. I wasn’t okay with her being disrespectful and bossy toward him. I wasn’t okay with her really, really awful table manners.

And part of the reason I wasn’t okay with any of these things was because I was raising a kid myself, a daughter same age as my future SD, who knew damn well that any of that behavior would be completely unacceptable.

Yet Dan didn’t support my attempts to parent SD, nor did he step in to parent her himself. So my SD thought I was favoring my own kid over her, while my BD thought SD was getting the kid glove treatment. All our attempts to keep things fair between the girls fell completely flat due to the complications of different custody schedules, different parenting expectations, and Dan’s total lack of follow-through.

The divorce of her parents had wrecked my stepkid’s world already. Adding a stepmom to the mix brought more emotional complexity than my stepdaughter was equipped to handle.

Stepkid vs. bio kid: who has it harder?

My own kid, on the other hand, could not have jumped into our stepfamily situation with more enthusiasm. She was thrilled to have Dan around, and over the moon about getting a new “little” sister (that 4 months’ difference in age really counts when you’re 7).

When BD’s excitement was met by SD’s mixed emotions — which ranged from cool indifference to sulky rejection — she shook it off and rebounded as quickly as a chipper puppy who’d just gotten smacked on the nose. Hey that hurt! But okay! I get it! You don’t want to play right now…. But what about now? How about now? Can we play yet? Are you ready now??

BD seemed like she was handling everything so well, I thought I didn’t have to worry about her. Thank god BD is so solid, I’d tell myself, and go back to strategizing with Dan over the best way to handle the latest showdown with his ex, or argue with him once again about why he kept letting his daughter treat me like shit.

Except over time, between the constant warfare between houses and the constant bickering within our own, my existing anxiety issues became completely unmanageable. Over time, the insane amount of emotional stepparenting labor I took upon myself trying to win my stepdaughter over (instead of taking a breather like any sensible person would’ve done) and my emotionally exhausting love/hate relationship with being a stepmom combined to erode my foundations so entirely that I lost myself in there somewhere.

Because I lost myself in the stepparenting role, my daughter lost me too. Right when she needed me most. And I was so emotionally upside down, I couldn’t even see it.

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The impact of blended family life on my bio kid

I was so busy hovering over my obviously struggling SD that I didn’t think about whether my BD needed extra emotional support as we entered into the shitstorm that was the aftermath of Dan & HCBM’s divorce. Outwardly, BD seemed pretty okay. She wasn’t having any of the adjustment problems SD showed and got along fine with all of us.

But one place BD wasn’t doing fine was with her own biological dad. Largely absent, BD’s dad was practically famous for canceling on her at the last minute, leaving her heartbroken every single time. And sure, Dan was in her life now — but as much as BD loved Dan, Dan was not her dad. What my kid really wanted was for her own dad to be as amazing and present a father figure as Dan was. Which her biological dad wasn’t and could never be.

By the time we moved in with Dan, BD was just starting middle school — a crappy time in everyone’s childhood, but made that much crappier when you have to switch schools yet again like BD did. And while she gained a full-time father figure when we moved in with Dan, she lost the steadiness that I’d always given her. As flaky as her dad was, as much as we moved, as many other elements had changed in her short life up to that point, the one thing she’d always been able to count on was me.

Wait, why’d she lose me? Where was I during all this? Reading Dan’s custody agreement for the millionth time, of course. Helping him decide on the perfect wording for yet another email to HCBM, hoping this time we’d counter all of her arguments so perfectly that she’d calm the hell down and stop trying to destroy our relationship with SD. Hiding in the bedroom crying because I was terrified I’d ruin Dan’s relationship with SD if I didn’t shrink myself as small as humanly possible.

In short, I was anywhere but present. And my awesome kiddo got completely, shamefully, unforgivably lost in the shuffle.

Are stepfamilies inherently problematic for kids?

There are innumerable reasons that stepfamily life is complicated, not least of which is that each member of a blended family brings his or her baggage to the table — yes, even the kids. And we need to take all of those fears and preconceptions and even our personality differences into account if we hope to give ourselves room to blend.

As stepparents, it’s way too easy to lose ourselves in our new role. We tell ourselves that we’re trying to build a family, that we must succeed at all costs, and it’s all on us to figure out how to achieve that end goal of perfectly blended. The problem is, the way to actually blend a family is pretty much the exact opposite of how we think we’re supposed to blend a family. So as much work as we’re killing ourselves to put in, we’re actually driving ourselves further ever away from “blended.”

The entire time I bent myself over backwards trying to win SD’s approval and smooth over conflict between houses, I told myself I was doing it for my daughter. That by joining lives with Dan, I was giving BD the “real” family she deeply deserved, and I deeply regretted I hadn’t been able to provide.

It’s only with hindsight that I wondered if I made the right decision — that maybe being raised by a single mama in a drama-free home would’ve been better for her than dragging her into the emotional crossfire of someone else’s very messy custody battle, even if she did get Dan out of the deal. And certainly she was better off with the mama who was clear-minded and functional rather than the one who ended up drowning in anxiety-turned-PTSD from the stresses of stepfamily life.

It’s also only with hindsight that I can now see: at no point were BD and I ever not a real family. We didn’t need any more players to complete us; we were playing the game just fine on our own. In my frantic desire to give my kid the family I thought she needed, I ignored way more red flags than I ever should have. I sacrificed the stability of the family we’d already created, just the two of us.

The big picture of blended family life

There are so many factors we weigh while deciding whether to move forward with becoming a stepfamily. There are many, many large, loud, obvious challenges: struggling to bond with your stepkid, your partner not having your back as a stepparent, problems with the ex, expensive financial commitments like court fees and child support, and exhausting, erratic schedules. And those are just the ones I can rattle off the top of my head.

Beyond and behind those challenges, though, don’t forget to look at the long-term effects of living in a stepfamily. Not just on yourself, but also on any kids you’re bringing into that dynamic with you… including that “ours” baby you think might be in the cards later on. And if you choose to move forward, remember that the absolute best way you can protect your kids from any drama is to first protect yourself.

Put your own oxygen mask on and draw clear boundaries that keep conflict at bay. Prioritize your own mental health, even if that means taking a step back from hands-on stepparenting, so you can be there first and foremost for yourself… which in turn ensures that you have the emotional bandwidth to also be there for your kiddos.

The best gift we can give our bio kids is being present as parents. The more we lose ourselves in the stepparenting role, the more our kids lose us too.

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