When the overwhelm got too much, when I felt like my heart was being broken everyday and I was the last one on everyone’s list, I didn’t know where to turn. I mentioned before that social media was just starting to come into play and I didn’t know much about it. I found that the chat groups and online forums I joined didn’t give me what I needed. It seemed so impersonal to me. It was just venting and complaining and talking about how horrible the bio moms were. I didn’t like immersing myself in those places because it just made all of the thoughts I was already having swirl and grow. It made me want to give up because I didn’t see the hope and happy outcomes.
I was in university at the time working towards my psychology degree and was taking some sociology classes where I ended up writing a paper on divorce for one of my final projects. I wasn’t married yet but was dating a man who had gone through a separation and divorce. I saw what it was doing and it scared me. At that same time my parents separated after 30 years of marriage. That was a huge blow. It made me feel like I had lost hope in everything I knew and had believed in. I aced that paper. The premise was that divorce was too easy these days and fighting through the hard times was what marriage was all about. Those marriages where you loved the other person so much that no matter what happened you could work through it. I remember my professor’s comment on my paper when he returned it. He said ‘very well thought out Lindsay, I wish I would have read this before my wife and I had divorced’. I thought to myself, wow, maybe I have something here. I wonder if that paper was unknowingly the emergence of that piece of me that would rise up and push through with grit during what was to come.
I loved the classes and all the things I had learned at my time in college and university but nothing can really prepare you for being ‘in it’ as a stepparent. I still felt like I didn’t have the support to navigate my new life. I started seeing a therapist and was able to finally vent to her in person about everything that I was feeling without worrying about judgement. She validated my feelings and made me feel a bit better but then I remember very clearly the day she said to me “so what happens when you get married, have kids of your own and this continues to happen where you feel like he is choosing his first family or the kids over you and your new family?”
That day I walked out of the therapists office and I never went back to see her. It took me this long to admit she was right. This was my life. I wasn’t going to change the situation that came before me or change the people in it. I couldn’t fix it or the people involved, and I definitely couldn’t turn it into what I imagined my future to be no matter how hard I tried. So here I am fifteen years later, after more therapy individually and as a family but I am just now ‘accepting second’. I was grieving the loss of the future I had dreamed about since I was a kid. I pictured college, adventure, meeting new people, going out with friends, making stupid mistakes, travelling, with nothing tying me down. Then one day meeting the man of my dreams. The attraction and the excitement of those first few months and years feeling like you were the only two people in the world. Then getting married buying a house, starting a career that I love, planning financially for all of our dreams and making sure we were okay before having kids and sharing that new experience together in the perfect house with a white picket fence.
I never admitted to myself or anyone else that, once I entered into this relationship and this life, I had to accept who I was going to be and what it meant for my future. What no one ever told me was that before I could even think of doing that I had to grieve what I was losing. The day I left that therapists office I said to myself. NO. I was going to make this work and this was not going to be the rest of my life. We would be a priority, me and our future, however I imagined it – it could still be and I wasn’t always going to be second. Man did I try to make that so. So hard that I gave everything I had for our life, my husband, his kids, his ex to the point that I lost who I was.
I am an advocate for everything mental health and I think that if I had stuck it out with my original therapist we would have worked through this together. I don’t know if my therapist was a stepparent or second wife who actually ‘got it’ and I think that is why I was so angry about what she said. When you feel alone and someone says what she did it doesn’t sound helpful. You don’t want to believe that your life is going to be like that – so different from what you wanted and imagined. I was set on the idea that I could change it and fix everything. Little did I know, or care to admit at the time, she was helping me. I did make it here eventually. The hard way.
I walked away from help because I was challenged by the reality of accepting the life that was ahead of me. Being second was not something I was willing to do or knew how to do. I didn’t realize that everyone in our blended family had to grieve, in our own way, the loss of ‘what could have been’ before moving on. I had to accept and grieve the loss of what I had pictured my future to be. I was, probably subconsciously, stuck circling in the stages of grief for years. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. If I could have identified what I was grieving throughout those years I could have worked through things so much better. I would have got to the place of acceptance earlier. So I am telling you from experience that you will always be second in so many ways and that is exactly where you need to be if you are taking on this journey. You don’t have to be the first because second doesn’t mean less than, worse than, losing, or not good enough. Second means a choice. You were a choice made from love and lessons learned. It is the better choice because everyone is in it to do better. You are all choosing to love. You are choosing to be there because you want to be there. More amazingly you realize, sometimes long after the fact, that by choosing this second choice of how your life was supposed to go you end up being exactly where you were always meant to be.
Now that I am here I can also see that everyone in stepfamilies is grieving. Your spouse, the ex, the kids, the in laws and you. There is a lot of relief to acknowledge all of the losses for everyone. Name them, write them down and feel them. It changes your perspective for everyone involved. It allows you to have empathy no matter what the other people have done. Then you can move through the stages of grief together and messily find your way.