Another challenging aspect of becoming a stepparent is that you are also just married. You and your new spouse don't really get a period when its just the two of you. The pre-children patterns and conflicts aren't established because you're in an instant family. If you need to have a knock down, drag out fight ( and I mean verbally and even so, no hitting below the belt) and I believe couples do need that, the new stepparent may be reluctant to engage in front of the new step kids. I know I was. It was important to me that my step kids understand that I was there to stay and that the home environment was going to be more stable than what they had been use to. The consequence was that my wife and I sublimated these conflicts for the sake of the kids and it was to the detriment of our marriage. Of course this is all 20/20 hindsight by me and I certainly didn't realize this problem as I was creating it. Its apparent to me that this series is going to be filled with short quick random posts like this one. Thats sort of how my thinking is these days.
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