Blended families: Drama when step-kids, parents don’t get along

There was drama not long ago in Nairobi’s Githurai area when fed up neigbours ganged up and stormed a woman’s house, read her the Riot Act and warned her against mistreating her stepchildren. Apparently, the woman had developed the habit of unnecessarily beating up her two stepdaughters, and subjecting them to ‘hard labour’ as punishment whenever they errored.

The girls were always banged against the wall, scolded, yelled at, caned and slapped around at slightest provocation — like whenever they wet their bed (which was daily), interacted with neigbours or cooked more than enough food. Meanwhile, she never administered the same ruthlessness and brutality in the name of ‘discipline’ to her own two sons.

Upon scrutiny, neighbours revealed the woman always mistreated the children during weekdays when her husband, a teacher who teaches and lives in Embu Town, was a way. Over the weekends, when the man was a round everything seemed okay, never mind he was the ‘sat on’ type, and never confronted her when the children reported to him the cruelty.

Dysfunctional family

Details later emerged that theirs was a complex and almost dysfunctional blended family. The woman and her husband only have one child of their own; the family’s last born son. The two mistreated girls belonged to the man, and the woman had a son she came to the marriage with.

Surprisingly, in the family, despite the four children being unrelated (at least by blood), they seemed happy with each other, save for the stepmother’s hate for the two girls and the passive stepfather.

Stepfathers seem to easily get along with stepchildren. But tales told of most stepmothers are so horrifying that leave one wondering why the dislike and mistreatment of stepchildren.

Constantly fighting

Meanwhile, CrazyMonday did a spot check on a couple of step-families and the findings are starling. Many are in crisis. Some are constantly fighting, and even sue one another over this or that.

In others, stepchildren find their stepmothers way younger that they get embarrassed about them. Elsewhere, the ‘family’ members have unresolved issues with each other, so much that they don’t talk. And in others, children have formed camps and parents are considering divorce.   

If Anne’s son, Brian, would have had his way, she would have remained a widow for the rest of her life. The fact that she fell in love and remarried another man annoyed her son so much that a couple years down the line the boy still resents his stepfather and step-siblings.

From previous marriage

“He is a great guy, I genuinely love. Unfortunately, my son and him have never gelled. When meeting we had a lot in common. For instance, both of us had lost our spouses and had children to raise. We shared faiths and loved each other’s company,” she says.

However, fact that they both had kids from previous marriages turned out to be the poisoned chalice in their newfound love. “All was well but our children hardly got along,” she says. Brian has never accepted his stepfather and stepsiblings.

Culture shock

“He believes after his father, I didn’t need another marriage to be happy. The boy accepted his father’s death, but seems not to crave for a different man to be his father,” she says, adding that her son sees her second marriage as unnecessary.

When Anne (with Brian in tow) moved in with Sam (a single father of two adolescents, Leila and Ben) the first months were stormy. Interestingly, Leila and Ben played along. According to Anne, the kids were gobsmacked with the new arrangement. It’s just that none of them could say it out loud. “Our lives largely progressed in parallel lines perhaps because of culture shock. The kids attended different schools, seeing as the family was formed when they had already enrolled,” says Anne.

Sibling rivalry

The two parents got along quite easily, assuming the children would blend in and move on until one day when poop hit the fan while on holiday in Mombasa.

“The family had been together for almost a year when we went for a getaway in Mombasa. What we didn’t know was that Brian’s hate for his stepsister and brother, which we had all along been ignoring, would spiral out of control.

Brian was fond of thinly veiled insults, which always hurt the others. On this particular holiday, an argument that quickly degenerated into a fight between Brian and Ben broke out, with the former beating and seriously injuring the former in the hotel lobby. It was an ugly scene, I tell you,” Anne tells CrazyMonday.

Incest rife

The bubble went off. Three days of vacation turned out to be three nights of uncertainty. Eventually, Anne says, the couple had to face up to the situation.

“We called for a meeting,” she says, “to deliberate on what had just happened. We had to resolve the impasse. Sammy and I decided to take the reins and give directions. Clearly, the kids were yet to grow up unlike what we believed.” The family survived. Civility resumed. The scars, however, are visible.

Joel Kariuki has nothing but fierce loathing for step-family arrangements. His critique is based on ‘eye witness’ accounts of a quasi-happy family. His description is both hilarious and absurd. “Imagine a scenario where your father, in his quest to experience the firm bosom of a younger woman, gets himself a lady who isn’t old enough to be his wife but still not young enough to be your wife.

The lady, whose calculative move suggests that she is out to fleece him?” he poses.

He goes on to add, “It is in such arrangements where cases of incest are rife. Who wants to have such madness going on in their own house? Since most siblings in such unions know they are not related by blood, chances that they may try to mess around with each other are very high. Media are awash with stories of fathers who sleep with their stepdaughters.”

The look on Joel’s face is worth a thousand words. He wonders what happens when such behavior results into pregnancies. “How do you live from that point onwards?” he asks, with a sheepish chortle. “That is totally in variance with our culture as Africans.” Joel firmly believes that widowed families should strive on their own.

Wandia Maina, a psychologist at Phoenix Training solutions in Nairobi, says that step families are not as bad as naysayers make them look. They can work, she says. They can grow too, “just as normal as the traditional nuclear families,” she says.

The secret, she admonishes, lies in tact and diplomacy.

Onus on parents

“If the couple are serious with starting a family together, they will need to plan and handle the situation well. Both the man and the woman have to introduce their children to their new spouses. They should let them [the children and the new spouse] develop their own relationships that depicts father-son, mother-daughter situations,” adds Wandia.

But it shouldn’t end there. Wandia says that in order that the children click into position with the new parents, spending time with them would earn their trust.

“Treat every child as if they were your own. Talk to them. Discipline them as you would your own biological child. The onus is on the parents to make it right. Years down the line, you will find that the children have no problem the two families merging to one – they will yearn to have them together.”

Set rules

It is exactly how Joan and Moses Njangi managed to join their families into a peaceful unit. The two met in church. He was a widower with a son and a daughter. She was divorced; a mother of two girls. “Because of our faith, we set and stuck to rules.

In the initial stages, we treaded carefully because none of us was sure if the arrangement would work or fail,” says Joan. “Our children were old enough to understand what was happening. So we talked and interacted with them. By the time we decided to go for it (remarry), there was a general contentment across the board.”

Bonding sessions

But that did not mean that the transition was seamless. The high-noon came when their teenage daughters appeared to compete for attention and had the usual sibling rivalries. “We decided that we would ‘swap’ them for an outing to bond. My wife would take my daughter with her and I would take her daughter with me. We talked to each like they were our biological girls,” Moses says.

For Jane, it was important that her step-daughter understands “that she was really, in every sense of the word, my daughter,” she says. Six years later, the family welcomed the first baby by the two parents. The couple say it’s been a smooth ride characterized with happiness and synergy. Ten years on, the bonds of sisterhood and brotherhood have been cemented. For outsiders, it would be difficult to make out that four siblings share not even one cordon of DNA.

Never play favourites

Love between man and woman went sour when each began to analyse what was in it for them and treating the children differently. That is not how it should be, according to Wandia. “The general feeling is that if the children aren’t biologically yours, you got a raw deal. The children from a previous relationship are viewed as ‘out growers’. But for the marriage to work, the couple will have to practice ‘No-favoritism’ policy,” says Wandia

The expert, however, warns and advises parents against sacrificing their own happiness for the sake of children. This sort of arrangements must be well looked into before one gets into it. “Parent’s ought not to sacrifice their happiness for their children?” Wandia concludes.