Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to have a “blended” family.  I have four beautiful children from my first marriage, and my husband and I just had a baby girl 10 months ago.  To be completely blatant, it has been a very difficult ride.  It has been 5 long years of ups and downs.  My children love their dad.  They miss their dad when they are not with him, and I can see that when they allow themselves to get close to their step-dad, they feel they are betraying their father.  

My husband loves my children to death, but relationships as a whole are not his specialty.  He struggles with intimacy, so making a connection with my kids has been difficult to say the least.  They resent his presence at times because they subconsciously feel that if he were not here, perhaps their dad would be.  Obviously, that is not the truth, but try explaining that to a 6 year old….or a 9 year old…or an 11 year old…or a 13 year old!  They don’t understand that even without my husband in the picture, their dad and I would still be apart. 

The kicker here is that I get along great with my ex husband.  We are really good friends and my children see that…so does my husband.  I thought that is how it needed to be.  I thought I was doing my kids a favor by staying close to their father and allowing them to see that we are still a team when it comes to raising them.  However, our friendship has in some ways given them the impression that we should still be together.  They cannot possibly understand that no matter how great mommy and daddy get along now, it wasn’t always like that.  They don’t understand that we can only be great friends because we are not trying to be married to each other.  For that matter, I’m not even sure if my husband realizes that anymore.  I think he has doubts too.  I honestly think that at times, my husband believes if he were out of the picture, my original “family” would be together again.  So he carries around unsubstantiated guilt over something he had nothing to do with.  Again, with or without him, my ex and I don’t work as a married couple. 

So what do I do?  How do I bridge the gap between my children and husband?  Who wrote the manual on divorce and blended families because I need a copy ASAP? 

Bottom line, I cannot sit back and watch my kids feel guilty over their love for two men any more, and I cannot handle watching the devastation in my husband’s eyes when he reaches out to one of my kids and they turn their back on him.  I am the tie that binds these two camps together, and I’m slowly losing my grip.