waxing poetic on the big picture
i'm home from work today with a bad cold. i'm in my pajamas, no-one else is home, and its snowing pretty hard. i have a fire going and its pretty cozy, despite me being sick. doing a lot of thinking lately about step parenting. a lot.
my marriage is going to fail. it is. its been on its way there for quite some time, but i wasnt really ready to look at it head on. but its on its way. a lot of our marriages are going to fail. us, the ones with step children. i've read a LOT of interesting views on st over the past year but no-one really has the answers as to why this is. not even the experts. no-one knows, it just happens.
in the 1950's, men and women's roles were pretty clearly defined. the wife/mother stayed home, raised the children, did all of the housework. men went to work and provided the income. seemed pretty simple. but no-one talked about domestic violence and what to do if you were widowed and *divorce* was an evil ugly word. these seemed to be more of "women's" problems then "men's" and it was another 10-20 years or so until these issues reached common mainstream society.
could that be a reason as to why we all struggle so much? because in the grand scheme of things this is more commonly a "woman's" issue and its shoved under the rug? i thought we had advanced as a society much further than that. well, viagra is handed out like candy and birth control isnt covered by insurance, but overall, why arent second marriages and the troubles involved discussed more openly? we have wednesday martin, but are we in need of a patricia ireland, a betty friedan, and a gloria steinem? do we need those "what would jesus do?" bracelets, except ours would say "what would gloria steinem do?" (i met her once at a book signing-an absolutely LOVELY person)
we dont have that one single person or group of people leading the charge into the rights of step parents in society. but we do have each other. i am grateful beyond belief for you ladies (and gentlemen) of this board. and for dawn and admin-they've done a tremendously eloquent job of keeping it together.
if we talk about it more, form real life support groups, encourage funding for studies, work on the screwed up legal system.....and how about some support groups for guilty daddies? (imagine that meeting? "why am i here, my kids are perfect!")
i dont know. thoughts? comments?
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Marriages in general fail.
Marriages in general fail. Look at the statistics. So, yes, many marriages here will fail.
I think the difference is that now divorces are common when in the past people just stayed in dysfunctional relationships for the sake of the children. And, in the rare occassions when divorce DID happen, the children stayed with mom and dad took them out once a week for ice cream and brought them home.
So, if you think, in my parent's generation, divorce was not common, nor was it as common for father's to be active parents. They were Disney dads.
I say all that to say, that I think this "blended family" thing is a very new sociatal construct with rules that really haven't been made "the norm." Society, as a whole, is not very supportive of second marriages.
Not to mention that dealing with someone else's children and their wacked out ex's can be just damn hard. Put all that together and no wonder it's so hard.
thanks naturalmom. i was
thanks naturalmom.
i was thinking about how we had some pretty awesome women paving the way for us way back then. maybe our generation can shed some light on these issues so our daughters and granddaughters can have an easier time of things.