✌🏼 Disengaging from your stepkid is not a failure
Stepping back as a stepparent is sometimes the best way to move forward.
Whenever my yoga instructor leads us into a balancing pose, she invariably gives a speech about how it’s okay to lose your balance, like: “You only learn to keep your balance by falling.”
This is the only time in my life I’ve heard someone talk positively about failing at something. Like maybe failure doesn't exist, really — only learning. Maybe we’re all just figuring out how to keep our balance better the next time.
Yet even if we can (grudgingly?) accept that on an intellectual level, we still heap all kinds of unrealistic expectations on ourselves. We don't want to lose our balance. We want immediate, immaculate perfection — we expect ourselves to shoot straight to the moon on our very first try.
But I mean… no one did that on their very first try, either. Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind didn’t happen till Apollo 11; NASA went through 10 attempts before that. In fact, this past week marked the anniversary of the most tragic: the Apollo I disaster, in which three astronauts lost their lives during a simulation training. The commemorative plaque hung in their memory reads ad astra per aspera: "through hardship, the stars."
Sometimes we have to learn the hard way first. By failing. By falling.
When I first heard about disengaging, I thought there was no way that was for me. There was no way I was ever gonna quit doing my best to make us into a family — to become a better stepparent. I'm a scrapper at heart; not fighting for what I want just isn't in my nature.
To me, disengaging sounded a whole lot like failing, and I was not ready to admit defeat.
What I learned — after years and years of losing my balance and falling on my face — is that disengaging is the opposite of failing. It's stopping, taking a deep breath, finding your center again, then reassessing what actually works (or doesn't work) for your stepfamily so you can try a new way to reach those stars.
Because they’re out there, all right. There's just a whole bunch of hardship between here and there.
So if you’re in a stepparenting season right now where your stress levels have you seriously considering whether you need to rethink your approach toward blending your family and/or you’re debating whether you need to take a step back, I just want to let you know: disengaging does not mean you’re failing as a stepparent.
You’re just finding your balance.
🧡🧡
— Maarit.
