5 Structural Challenges of Remarriage By Maggie Scarf l Excerpt from The Remarriage Blueprint

The Powerful Impact of Insider/Outsider Forces

Insider/outsider forces are a basic, inbuilt feature of remarriage. They tend to shift the members of the couple into opposite positions because their early experiences of the marriage are so different. One partner (the outsider) often feels left out and rejected when the mate’s children are on the scene. The other partner (the insider) feels wrenched between his or her lifelong commitment to his or her offspring and the person he or she has fallen in love with and married.

In brief, the insider parent is trying hard to mediate between the way the family used to operate and the different ways the outsider partner feels it should operate in the future. To be noted is the fact that in families where both mates bring children to the marriage, these insider/outsider roles can switch around depending on whose youngsters are on the scene.

The Children Involved Have Undergone Early Losses

Children experience the initial loss of the intact family—be it due to divorce (95 percent are) or death—as a volcanic upheaval, inevitably bringing deep grief and fears of abandonment in its wake. A striking example of a child’s bitterness and sorrow appears in chapter 4, my interviews with the Jamisons. Abbie Jamison’s son, Rob, became upset and rejecting toward both his mother and stepdad when Abbie’s remarriage required a move clear across the country and a separation from the boy’s loving grandparents, cousins, school, and friends.

Furthermore, the subsequent marriage is very likely to arouse a conflict of loyalties. The children of remarriage are often assailed by the guilty feeling that harboring liking—or even outright loving—feelings for the “replacement parent” is a betrayal of the “real,” biological parent (in reality or in memory if that parent has died).

Parenting Tasks Tend to Move the Partners into Intense

This challenge tends to move the partners into hotly contested, oppositional positions. The stepparent wants to effect some changes in the way the mate’s single-parent family system has hitherto operated—for over time, families with this type of structure tend to become too lax and permissive. However, the stepchildren ignore or defy his or her requests; they’ve suffered through too many demands for change already and want things to remain just as they were before the stranger/stepparent entered the scene. The natural parent wants both to please his or her new spouse and yet reassure the children that things will stay the same and they won’t experience any more earth-shaking transitions.

It is true that during the period of singlehood, the biological parent’s authority has slipped a bit, and he or she is likely to be overly permissive. So while the stepparent wants to demand more order and respectfulness, the natural parent wants to cut the children an unusual amount of slack and excuses many of their questionable behaviors.

This issue emerged most visibly in my interviews with Julie and Matthew Albright, described in chapter 2. Julie wanted to set limits on her stepson, Gabe, during the times when he was in her care. Matthew and his ex-wife, Fran, overruled her, thereby depriving her of authority as the female head of her household.

Uniting Two Disparate Family Cultures

The vast challenge presented here involves the plenitude of differences that each party brings to the newly created stepfamily. Agreement on everything from whether you can start eating before everyone sits down at the table to whether you hang your coat on a hook or throw it on the sofa are simply taken for granted by the biological parent and the children but are unknown and often not understood by the newest member of the family.

The difficulties that emerge in this situation have to do with the relatively thin common ground (implicit knowledge of habits, rules, routines) shared by the remarried partners and the thick common ground forged over years by the biological parent and his or her offspring. A new common ground must be created over the course of time, one that will be satisfying and comfortable for all members of the newly created family system.

Two good examples of this particular challenge appear in chapter 6, the tale of the Burkes, where new wife Carole was incensed by Ted’s adult children’s refusal to clean up the kitchen in the ways that meant a lot to her. The fact that these small requests were being routinely ignored made her feel invisible and as if she might be “going crazy.” She felt like an alien, as if she didn’t belong in Ted’s family’s household.

In chapter 8, I recount the tale of the Perez/de Matteo couple and describe the clashes that can occur when two different family cultures and two different ethnic cultures exist simultaneously. In regard to this latter couple, it should be noted that some 50 percent of Americans presently marry outside their own ethnic group, and the rate of socioeconomic and cultural intermarriage climbs even higher in remarriage situations.

As shown in chapter 8, Vicki de Matteo and Miguel Perez were communicating with one another through not one but two sets of misunderstandings.

Extension of Family Boundaries

In a first-marriage nuclear family, the members include the biological parents and their blood-related (or adopted) dependent children. In the case of remarriage, the new household will not be complete as it stands, for there will be a family member living outside it (the other biological parent) who must be included within the overall system. Therefore, there will be a “boundary with a hole in it” to offer this parent easy access.

As we shall see with the Duvaliers in chapter 3, this unclosed boundary can be fraught with difficulties. Cliff’s first wife had eloped with his close friend, basically leaving him to mourn for her eternally (she believed). Thus, his enormous contentment with second wife Sara seemed to irk the first wife tremendously, and she was doing everything possible to upset the remarried couple by interfering in their lives whenever and wherever she could.