A Good Book on Blending Families is Hard to Find ....

You need a library for the amount of guidebooks rained on you when you become a mother:  whether to use towelling nappies or disposables, when to wean, how to socialise your toddler, how to keep the lines of communication open with your teenager – the list is endless.  In fact, the sheer volume of information available to you on becoming a mother and being the best at it ever can overwhelm you.

Still, at least there’s lots of advice available, and there are always other mothers around to offer a bit of support and a listening ear – even if it is just to gloat about how much better they have it than you at the moment.  Happily, there’s also a growing wealth of information and help for stepmothers, as half of today’s marriages involve them.

There’s a variety of mother, however, that doesn’t have access to ready supplies of expertise from those who’ve gone before her.  Finding a guidebook for this brave lady has proven a frustrating exercise until now.  Hers is not a new breed, though;  for as long as there have been mothers there have been blending stepmothers, only they’ve been so busy and muddled that none of them thought to write it all down.  Either that, or they assumed that no single mother of the future would be idiotic enough to take on a new partner and his offspring in addition to her own, much less attempt to help raise them under the watchful eye of his ex.

I searched for such a book as I blundered into blending, and never found it.  I needed it – badly.  Surely I wasn’t alone?  I reasoned that there must be thousands of blending stepmothers like me out there, all at a loss and feeling more than a bit gloomy.  So here it is – “In The Blender”:  the book I wrote as I groped my way through the ups and downs, stumbling over all the ideals that my original, nuclear family had left behind.

I’ve read lots of books on stepmothering, and each one starts off with the author saying how much she didn’t want to write it.  The usual reasoning is that ‘revisiting the early days is too painful’.

I find that odd.  I really wanted to write this one on blending for a very good reason:  I could have used the support in my early days as a fledgling blending agent.  And I feel safe.  There’s a huge difference between remembering events and reliving them.  From the safety of the here and now I can look back on my bumpy road to Blending Maternity without feeling the pain of every stubbed toe all over again; hopefully, I’ll pass on a pearl or two of blending wisdom gleaned from my many interviews with other stepmothers, counsellors and life coaches.

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