Living in a Blended Family

But by the way we’ve got to qualify this because if you live in the southeast part of the United States, a blended family is generally the term for a biracial couple.

A lot of people are really surprised. From a sociological standpoint, let me say two things. The proportion of blended families in our culture today is a little higher than it used to be. But going back clear 100 years, it’s still about the same as it is now.

Now here’s what’s different. One hundred years ago, 150 years ago, most step-families were born out of the death of one parent. The average marriage lasted seven years but it wasn’t because of divorce. It ended because the death of a parent, usually the mom in childbirth. So the dad was left, he had children, he marries again. That’s a stepfamily.

So the proportion of stepfamilies in our culture has always continued to be about the same, although I believe in the last 20 years it has begun to increase pretty rapidly. We can come back to some trends about why that is.

Here’s the other thing that really surprises a lot Christian people. If you stop and you look at the Old Testament families of the Bible, they were stepfamilies of a different color, I should say. They were complex families where you had multiple marriage. So it wasn’t a marriage and a death and then another marriage, or a divorce and another marriage. It was Jacob getting married four times…

So they’ve always been a part of God’s people. I think that’s a really important thing because I encounter a lot of ministry leaders who, one eyebrow goes up when I begin to talk about this. They’re like, ‘Who, what, why would we even – what’s the ministry all about and why do we need to do that?’ As if this was a new thing. It’s not a new thing.

So there’s three different ways you can find yourself in a blended family. It’s not always about divorce. Sometimes it is; most of the time it is. But often it’s about the death of a spouse. We’re living longer so think about this scenario. You have a 30 marriage and your spouse dies. And a year later you get married again.

My brother-in-law became a step-son, a step-child, at the age of 49. Now this guy is not telling him to take out the trash, that’s not the nature of their relationship. But he is figuring out who is this guy married to my mom and how do we get along at Thanksgiving. It changes everything in their family. His grandkids now have a step-grandparent. Think about that for a minute. Those are very legitimate reasons that people find themselves in step family situations. So we’re living longer and there are lots and lots of later life marriages that are forming step families.

And the last trend is out of wedlock pregnancy. You may have heard this, 40% of children in the US now are born out of wedlock. That’s kind of the headline. You’ll see that when we’re talking about family ministry. But here’s what people don’t know that’s behind that. Ready for this? Sixty percent of those couples that are having a child out of wedlock, there’s already one child. One of those two parents, the mom or the dad of this new baby, already has a kid from another relationship.

So there’s the path of no marriage and no divorce and no death. There’s the path of divorce. There’s the path of the death of a spouse. All of which give birth to blended families.

So we estimate in our ministry that easily one third of all weddings in the US today, at least a third, are giving birth to a blended family. It could be as high as 40%.

So I’m doing premarital counseling, for example, in my church and a couple comes to me, and wow, he has two kids and she has three. All I know to do is do my premarital counseling thing so I talk to the couple about communication and sex and managing their money and praying together. I don’t know to talk about kids or ex-spouses or the complexities of being a parent and a step-parent in the same household. I don’t even know to talk about those things.

Let me give you another analogy that may encourage you, and that is Family Life, the ministry that I work with, international ministry, subsidiary of CRU. We’re in 101 countries throughout the world, 50,000 or 60,000 people in North America will go through our marriage conference called A Weekend to Remember. This year, 60,000 will be touched by that. We have online materials and resources. And for 38 years, Dennis Rainey has been the president of that; he is a DTS grad.

So we’re just really catching on to this thing. We’ve got to do something about this.

For example, you don’t have to recreate entirely new things. Whatever you’re doing for couples in your marriage ministry around communication or sexuality or all those topics that we like to talk about, those all help couples in stepfamilies, too. So that’s great; you’ve got a running start. Now add 100% more to what you teach them because there’s a whole new set of things.

For example, Family Life is doing that. The Weekend to Remember marriage conference that we talked about now has sprinkled all the way through the two and half-day event messages and tips and tools and a story that illustrates some piece of healthy step family living. We know our audience is about 25% blended couples so we can speak to them in the midst of the general marriage ministry. Pastors can do this from the pulpit.

One of the most creative ideas I’ve heard recently is a senior pastor, he’s preaching on marriage and one of the things he’s learned to do is maybe bring up a couple at the end of the sermon, and of course it’s pre-arranged, and they have a little conversation just like you and I are. And he gets to ask them how they have applied the principles he’s been teaching about.

Now what he does is he brings up two couples, one in a first marriage and one in a stepfamily. Sometimes their answers are very parallel to one another and pretty much the same. But on occasion the couple in the stepfamily will say, ‘Yeah, but in our family it works like this. This is what’s on our mind. Money management in our marriage not only applied to me but applied to the money we have to think about going to the other home, child care.’ So there are layers of complexity begin to come out and the people who are attending get to see that, especially those who are living that or somebody who is a grandma who cares about her son who lives in a step family all the way across the country. And everybody is learning how that applies to them.

Just those simple little things that you do add to what you normally would have done and really, really touches people’s lives.

I’ll just go ahead and share my own story. My mom died at 42 when I was 14 years old. And so my dad remarried several years later and so we have a new mother in the house now. Now two of my siblings were already in college when she passed away and then two of us were in the house. And I was the only one, I had a brother and two sisters, I was the only one of the four of us who liked the person that my dad married. Everyone else had a suspicious or even hostile reaction.

Which introduced all kinds of new stuff into the dynamics of what had been a healthy family but a little bit traumatic. We had been through cancer as a family together from the time I was eight until my passed away at 14 so we had had six years or that, in and out of hospitals and that kind of thing. That was disruptive. But we knew my mom and dad loved each other and we all got along. It wasn’t perfect, but it was nice. Now all of a sudden in the house there was all this tension you didn’t used to have introduced by a figure who my dad obviously cared about a great deal, but the kids were not happy.

And my younger sister was so traumatized by my mom’s death, because she was a couple years younger than I was, that she was still going through the grief of losing mom. We all were, but it really hit her significantly at a very sensitive age.

And so actually what I’m mapping out to you is probably not atypical. Every child has a different reaction to what’s happening in the house. And in the midst of that, you’ve got all these balls bouncing off the walls colliding at different angles with each other.

Well now marriage is a capstone; it’s not the gateway. I’m not saying it should be this, I’m just saying that’s the way people view it. It’s the capstone. So you can live together, you can have three kids with three different fathers, but you’ve not arrived until you’ve gotten married. It’s still prized that much. But how you get there is just a totally different path.

But it used to be that marriage is the beginning of the story. Now when it gives birth to a blended family it’s the middle of the story and there is a lost narrative that is always following the family, and it’s at the heart of everything. So a kid who says, ‘You’re not my mom, I don’t have to do what you say,’ is in part telling you, ‘I miss my mom.’ That’s what’s deep in that statement. I wish she were here. But she’s not and I’m having to grieve her, and you being here is a constant reminder of that.

Here’s the thing, the adults and pastors tend to forget that loss didn’t end after the funeral. It just rolls every day for the rest of your life. And it’s always there.

Now here’s the other thing, the big rock that was tied up in your story, and it’s what we call competing attachments. So again, think about how big this is. In a first family, husband and wife meet, fall in love and then they begin to have children. All the emotions and attachments between those family members are all moving in the same direction. Nothing competes. They all move together. So when Dad spends time with his wife, the kids may be, ‘We wish we could go to the movie with you, but we understand. You guys are in love and you do that romantic thing and that’s okay with us. We love it that you’re together.’

Here’s another observation about that. If Dad spends time with a son, is Mom threatened by that? No. She’s thrilled that Dad is investing in their kid. All things in balance. You don’t want to overdo anything. But the relationships are moving in the same direction.

Now in step family on day one, there is somewhere a competition. Relationships compete. So your sister’s relationship with your dad is now competing for your step-mom’s relationship with your dad. Think about that. So if Dad is successful in his marriage, it might come at the expense of a relationship with his child. And to that kid, this is not just one loss; this is loss number 100,000 on top of Mom’s death. So they’re highly sensitive to that.

And again, to show you the difference, I got to be a big brother to little brothers I never had. That was kind of fun. But to my older brother, and really to my older sister, it was three pieces of the family that never were a part of the family.

Think about how profound competing relationships is. I’d like to joke about this one for a minute. What if the Trinity had competing relationships? Can you imagine on the day of Jesus’ baptism the Holy Spirit said, ‘Whoa. He’s your beloved Son? Come on. Not that again. Come on. You favor him all the time. No way I’m descending like a dove.’ I mean, think about that.

So you said it earlier when you said there was now tension in our home that we’d never had before. So what do you do with that? That’s new. That’s a new loss in and of itself. You and your siblings, you were kind of okay with step-mom and they weren’t.

And again, it’s easy for the biological parent, that’s just so classic that your dad would kind of feel that way because that’s a lot of what biological parents feel. In stepfamilies, we talk about insiders and outsiders, right? So your dad is an insider. He’s an insider with his children. They have DNA blood bond all the way down, psychological, spiritual, you can’t break that. Now he’s got this strong bond towards this woman that he’s fallen in love with. By the way, he still has a bond towards your mother and that has its own life to it. But he’s got this bond with this woman so for him, he’s an insider with everybody. But the step people, as I like to say, step-mom and step-kids now, are outsiders with one another and they’ve got to figure out how to become insiders and that’s where all the work comes in.

So because of the different locations we were coming at this relationship with and the reactions it was generating, everyone was in a different place in terms of what was going on.

You cook a stepfamily with a crockpot. Slow, a lot of time. But you get there and it’s really good to taste. Now here’s the deal. Some ingredients are in the crock-pot longer than others. You were in the crock-pot. You got to watch it, feel it, experience it, see it, participate in it in a way your older siblings, they were outside the crock pot, so to speak, living life on their own, older teenagers, maybe young adults. That’s what happens with a lot of what we call adult stepfamilies where the couple is later in life and their children are in their 20’s and 30’s, they’re not around at all. They don’t get to witness the nature of their relationship and come to trust it. It’s easy to be skeptical at that point.

That’s the point. Time is the thing that developments relationships.

Now let me just point out one thing to our audience. There is no sin in this story whatsoever.