🫠 How do we support our partners without losing ourselves?
Stepparenting without burnout -- is such a thing even possible??
Dan & I celebrated our anniversary this week, a date that makes me feel simultaneously grateful and regretful every year.
I'm thankful we made it through those hardest first years together… and yet, if only we'd known back then all the stuff we know now! Neither of us had any idea what we were really getting into with this whole blending-a-family thing.
We spent years trying to navigate the ins and outs of stepfamily life together: parenting each other's kids (or not), dealing with each other's exes (or not), figuring out what counted as overstepping vs. what counted as helping each other out.
006 | How partners can support stepparents
In this episode, Dan & I talk about 1) why stepparents need their partners' support to be successful, and 2) a list of practical ways that partners can offer that support.
By the time we got married, around 4 years in, I felt like we had a decent handle on things.
Except just 6 short months later, Dan's ex took him back to court and the conflict ramped up in earnest; we found ourselves facing an entirely new learning curve. A sharper, steeper, scarier learning curve with challenges we never knew existed and certainly couldn't have prepared ourselves for.
I poured my heart and soul into helping Dan defend himself during the court battle with his ex. I practically memorized his custody orders. I researched like crazy and learned that parental alienation was an actual thing. I bought new file folders and labeled them neatly to keep track of all the documentation I was busily organizing.
And all of that was very, very helpful for Dan and his case.
Know what would've been even more helpful though? Not making my entire life (and our entire relationship) about Dan's custody battle.
007 | How stepparents can support partners
In this episode, Dan & I talk about 1) the many ways stepparents can support their partners, including non-parenting ways, and 2) why that support doesn't usually look the way we thought it would.
I gave myself empty and then some. By the time his custody battle was settled, I was too numb to feel relieved — all I could do was collapse. Collapse, and also wonder how the hell did I get here? When did I lose track of myself so thoroughly?
My experience of charging head-first into major burnout (while not realizing that’s what I was doing) combined with my long, slow recovery back out of that miserable headspace is the main reason I put together this entire platform. I wanted to throw a rope out for those stepparents who are seriously struggling in the hopes of saving them before they imploded like I did.
17 Coping Tips for Managing Overwhelming Stepparenting Emotions
I used to think I was the only stepparent who struggled in this role. Which also made me feel like the worst human ever. But after many years of talking to thousands of stepparents, turns out it's super normal for stepparenting to be way harder than you expected! This list of coping tips for emotional overwhelm includes many of the practices I used myself to get my head above water again. xo
Helping our partners is great and all, but we can't continually prioritize their practical and emotional needs (or those of our stepkids) at the expense of our own well-being. Amid all our hard work to feel like a family, we cannot forget that our first responsibility has to be to ourselves and our own sanity.
There's a reason flight attendants tell us we've gotta put our own oxygen masks on first: because otherwise we stop breathing. And then we can't help anyone, least of all ourselves.
Your family needs you breathing, stepparents. Make space for self-care.
🧡🧡
— Maarit.
PS - If self-care feels like yet one more stupid thing you have to figure out how to carve out time for on a seemingly endless to-do list, I’m hosting a 30-day (non-cheesy!) gratitude challenge starting April 1 and I’d love for you to join in. I’ll be sharing daily prompts right here via post/email, as well as over on the Tiny Pep Talk podcast. xo