How Not To Create A Blended Family — According to My Old Diary Entries
And for the love of happiness, please don’t get remarried behind the children’s backs
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It could have been a breathtaking tale of romance. Instead, it’s one overshadowed by childhood trauma.
My father and his wife dated in their late teens. Then they went their separate ways. They married other people and had four children each. These marriages didn’t last, and the universe brought the teenage lovebirds back together.
Like I say, it could have been a tale of romance. A story of being unable to cheat destiny and how a first love can triumph over every other love. But that was just one strand of the story. The visible strand. The darker side of the story is the traumatic childhoods.
While the two adults may well have been lost in their rekindled cloud of giddy teenage love, the children — those who were young enough to be directly impacted — were left with wounds that carried on into adulthood.
I recently found diaries I kept as a youngster. Reading through these has left me bereft for my inner child. For years I gaslit myself, convinced it couldn’t have been that bad, and yet I couldn’t shake the feelings. Turns out the body really does keep the score.
Sure, it was the 90s, and talk of blended families was rare. On the one hand, I can recognise that maybe they didn’t know any better. But on the other hand, it’s grossly and willfully stupid of them to think that their actions and behaviours were conducive to a happy and harmonious household.
An assortment of estrangements, alcohol and drug reliance, broken relationships and poor mental health are just a few of the afflictions some of us children now face in adult life. You know, all the stuff that generational trauma feasts on. Could these have been avoided if things had been different? Maybe, maybe not, we will never know.
Ultimately, the needs and welfare of any children in a blended family should always be a priority. In my situation, perhaps that oversight is the greatest of travesties, which I hope will serve as lessons to be learned for others.
Please don’t get married behind your children's backs
During my upbringing, blended families were rare, but now almost one in three families in the UK are blended, meaning the family includes children from previous relationships.
As the prevalence of these families increases, I sincerely hope the way they are created is done with more care and consideration than I experienced.
On 14th January 1996, I was 14 years old and at boarding school (a story for another time), when I received a phone call from my father saying he felt bad as he had forgotten to tell me about his new girlfriend. I brushed this off as no big deal. He’d had a girlfriend before — one of the contributing factors to my parent's separation.
My father and I weren’t close. Never had been. In my diaries, I speak of the family hierarchies he built, the ways he played me and my siblings off against one another and all the ways he favoured my twin sister over me. After much therapy and healing I now recognise, and accept, that I was the scapegoat child to his narcissistic tendencies.
On 27th January 1996, my father took me and my sisters out for dinner. It was a “special day”, he said repeatedly, unusually buoyant and visibly excited. He told us he was getting married — to a woman we hadn’t met. This is when I learned that she had four children, two of whom were adults and two who were younger than me.
I learned that his fiancée and her youngest two children would be moving from their current home, almost nine hours away, into my father’s house. Interestingly, four of us fell into the 10–14 age category, which, according to this article, is the age bracket that may experience the most difficulty adjusting to a new stepfamily.
As I say in my diary, I was “half excited and half resentful”. And while I didn’t have the maturity or vocabulary to articulate my feelings of resentment, Mel Robbins covers this topic in her book The Let Them Theory. In her recognition of how hard the dynamics in blended families can be, she relays this wisdom for step-parents.
Don’t ever forget that step-children in particular need understanding, grace and compassion from you, because they’re not just learning how to accept a new adult in their life, they’re grieving the loss of the family they wanted.
If only my father and his fiancée were given this sort of advice.
On a positive note, my father was less cantankerous in the presence of his fiancée. I met her and the younger children several times before they moved in with my father in June 1996. I’ll come to this. But about the wedding specifically…
Later that year, on 28th September 1996, my father phoned to say that he and his fiancée were going to get married sooner than planned. When I enquired as to when, he said “Yesterday”. And with that, the rug was pulled out from under me.
I was devastated. Angry. Aghast. So much for all the talk about the role each of us children was to play in this wedding.
My diary reflects my hurt: “I’m so RAGING! So upset! I wouldn’t mind too much if he had warned us! BASTARD.”
I felt betrayed, excluded, irrelevant. I’m sure my siblings and step-siblings did too.
As far as I’m aware, none of us children were told about the wedding beforehand. My brother’s promised role as best man was silently revoked, and instead, they had friends serve as the best man and witnesses.
Still to this day, I can’t fathom why there was the need for such deception and exclusion, and how they lacked the emotional intelligence to see beyond their excitement and recognise the ways their secret wedding would so devastatingly impact their children.
A wedding could have been a way to bring us all together, a fusion of families, a ceremony to celebrate a new blended family unit. But alas. Perhaps their wedding was a sign of things to come. Because they weren’t building a family — although they loved to gloat that between them, they had eight children — they were building a relationship in which the children were secondary or perhaps even an impediment.
The importance of fairness, openness and no broken promises
Navigating the amalgamation of separate families can be treacherous, even when done with intentionality.
This article in Psychology Today encourages parents entering blended families to consider how each of their children feels supported, and to show up in ways that meet their children’s needs.
As one of the children, I am pretty confident that none of our needs were met. Our two families were blended in a food processor. A mindless process of brute force, and a “suck it up, this is how things are now” sort of process. Quite honestly, it felt destabilising and unsafe.
On 31st June 1996, after meeting my father’s fiancée and the younger two children a couple of times, they moved into his house. I was promised nothing would change, which is ridiculous when you think about it, as everything was going to change; it had to.
But the essential changes could have been done with fairness and open communication, and in a way that gained buy-in from all those involved.
I learned that the younger children had been given my room — the room that had literally been built for me and my twin — not through sensitive communication but by seeing their belongings in it.
Of course, logically it made sense. This was their full-time home. However, what with boarding school and my home with my mum, I was only there for a fraction of the time. But there are ways and means to execute such a manoeuvre to minimise resentment and hostility between children, and to protect a child from feeling pushed out.
Then I learned from my older sister that my father was giving the younger children weekly pocket money. Something he had never done for me.
And while now, as an adult, I understand the dynamic at play between me and my father, as a child, I was so desperate to be loved. So desperate to be accepted for who I was, to be seen as enough, that each act of perceived unfairness felt like a personal rejection.
I couldn’t help but view the younger children as stepping into my life and taking over. I was jealous of them. In my diary, I write about a time my father, his now wife and the younger children visited me and my twin sister at boarding school. We took the dogs for a walk, the dogs who were my pride and joy. The dogs that I doted on. But the younger children scooped up their leads, and my father remained silent. No advocating for me and my sister. I felt pushed aside, unseen and replaced.
It may sound silly and childish, but remember, we were children.
In all of this, the people I feel most sad for are the two youngest children. At least I had my escape. I wasn’t around that household much. Whereas they were immersed in it. They lived and breathed my father’s authoritarian parenting style and their mother’s enabling of it.
Sure, it’s hard to have other children move into your home, but it must be extremely tough to be the kid moving into another kid’s environment.
Don’t expect the new adult to be immediately accepted as a third parent
It takes time for children to adjust to a new parent figure in their lives. Forcing this is never going to bode well.
On 1st March 1996, just six weeks after first learning about my father’s new girlfriend turned fiancée and having only met her once, my father phoned me up to say he was likely attending my parents’ evening and “X will be with me, do you mind if she comes along?”
I’m proud of my younger self for taking a stand. I made it clear that I did mind. She wasn’t my parent, and my mum would be in attendance. I didn’t feel it was necessary or right to have an almost stranger privy to information about my schooling. But my father didn’t accept my response. He resisted. He told me I was looking at things from the wrong angle and reminded me that she was going to be my stepmother after all.
The mistake here was stark. My father’s attempts to push his fiancée on me only served to create a repellent. My father sowed the seeds of animosity.
In my diary, I wrote “Did she bring me up, change my nappies, take me to school, love me? NO!”
Upon reading the full account in my diary, I had the urge to hug the little girl in me. To tell her how brave she was for saying “no”. That little girl was asked an open question as if she had a choice, but the reality was that there was only ever one correct answer, and she was shamed for giving the wrong one.
As it turns out, my father didn’t attend this parents’ evening, perhaps as punishment to me, or something shinier came along — a pattern of absences that would play out throughout my life.
Incidentally, eight months later, there was another parents’ evening. This time, my father didn’t even seek my permission; he just took his wife along and disregarded my feelings on the matter.
And my father’s fiancée was not blameless. She could have honoured my wishes and not gone. There are things she could have done, or not done, to create more harmony in the mix.
When she and her children moved in, psychological warfare commenced. She moved me out.
My father had spent years encouraging me and my siblings to refer to his house as our “home”. Failure to do so was often met with a scolding. Yet, in my heart, it wasn’t home. My home was with my mum. And while his house wasn’t my home, nor was I a guest.
However, no sooner had his fiancée moved into my father’s house than she was pushing us out and referring to us as guests. Guests. And my father allowed this. I write this in my diary: “She fucking well called ME a guest at tea. I was so annoyed. I can’t say how bloody annoyed I was!”
Don’t get me wrong, of course, there were some fun and happy times. Rarely is anything all bad or all good. But the dynamics were fused with tangled undercurrents that only got more knotted over time.
It wasn’t until my late 30s that I learned how dysfunctional my blended family was. How harmful it was.
If you are currently navigating stepfamily dynamics, I know it’s hard. But please mind how you go. Children have very little agency over their lives as it is, being sensitive to their feelings and honouring their needs will go a long way in creating a healthy and happy blended family environment.
If you want positive family relationships in adulthood, let my blended family of origin be a warning to you. Because ultimately, there are no winners in my situation, we are all scattered in the wind, either trying to maintain fractured relationships or living fully estranged from each other.
Oh, how I wish things were different, but some things are too shattered for super glue.
Thank you for reading.
This piece was originally published in The Parenting Portal on Medium. Thanks to
for her editing over there.I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do you have step-parents, step-siblings or step-children? What has your experience been with blended families?
You may also enjoy my other Substack Life Without Children, a place for readers and writers of life without children, whether by choice or circumstance.
You can also find my writings and musings on Medium, where I write about well-being, feminism & personal growth. I also own the publication Life Without Children.
Ali, I'm so glad you had your journal as one safe place in your distressing family life. I felt so many "ouches" as I read this piece. I admire so much the beautiful person you've tured into despire such challenges in your childhood.
This is such an important read Ali - glad it’s here too 😍