By Kel | Leave A Comment
Blended families are not without a little work to create harmony, but sometimes some things just don’t mix.
I’ve written about making blended families work – work like the ones we see in hollywood Demi/Ashton and Bruce or Tom/Katie and Nicole/Keith (yeah, we’re on a first name basis.) 
I’ve spent many years struggling to make this type of arrangement work, poured my heart into this effort, gave blood, sweat and tears to this operation to ensure its success and in the end – it’s still a little lumpy, but it functions and we’ve found our groove so that we can coexist peacefully and our children know they are loved.
So when the chance to do it AGAIN arose, I did not think twice about how I wanted to handle it, of course we would be friends and live in harmony.
HA, ha, ha – FAIL!
I dug through my shelves of archives, dusted off my lessons learned and marched right up to my ex and said “Hi, we’re going to be friends…isn’t it great?” I’m delusional No, I did not ask his opinion on the matter, I did not doubt he would agree with me, instead I decided to boldly go where noone we had not gone before and believed it would work. Instead what I learned was – even the best of us sometimes forget to put the lid on the blender before we hit – GO!
Lesson 1 -
You cannot make it work for the other person if they DO NOT want to work on it too.
Lesson 2 -
No matter what excuses you make for the other person, no matter how logical their answers may seem to be, actions will ALWAYS speak louder than WORDS.
Lesson 3 -
Giving up does not always mean failure.
I have not one, but two sets of blended families. My ex and my husband’s ex. With the husband’s ex we are close and I know if I need something I can always call her up. With my ex, it is a different story…not a bad one, just different. I’ve struggled for a few years trying to bridge the gap between our two families, failing time after time, taking one step forward only to find it was followed with two steps back. I’ve been hurt and I’ve had my belief in humanity questioned, but never once have I ever let this affect my daughter. In the end I learned that it may not have turned out the way I had hoped, but life does not always turn out the way we hoped. As long as my daughter is loved, no matter by who…together we will take it one step at a time and together WE will get there.
How have YOU adopted your thoughts about blended families when things did not turn out as you originally thought?
**Kel can be found over analyzing life at CafeKel and teaching her children the art of sarcasm in everyday speak.
ABOUT Kel
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Oh I am right there with you my friend….while I am able to have amicable relationships with my husband’s ex as well as my children’s father most of the last six and a half years….I can never underestimate how very different we are in we feel children should be reared…yet ultimately I am responsible for my child rearing in my home. We work very hard to continually make the issue at hand the issue…as in, its learning to ignore the “You always expect too much” statement someone throws out in anger and then replying “its about your child not turning in his homework despite being done because he’s choosing not to”. conversations. Expectation differences and past conflicts often open a wide door for problems in our stepfamily journey, but as you said, there are times when a boundary has to simply be set because differences aren’t going to change and ultimately you have to do what you have to do….its important to me for my children to be close to their dad…but my mantra for all of our families is still true “Really loving someone means loving them as they are, not as you would like them to be” Loving them doesn’t mean however, that boundaries don’t have to be called and held. That’s the whole thing in blended families and extra families….we have to be much more firmly okay with setting the boundaries for our home and how to deal with the times they come back from other’s homes….toxic as usual….until they transition back to our environment.