Step By Step It Takes Patience And Love For A Stepmother And Her New Husband’s Children To Connect

Ruth-Ann Clurman thought she knew what she was getting into when she decided eight years ago to marry Steve Clurman - and to take on his three children, then ages 4, 6 and 8.

They would follow her rules. It would be fun.

Well, it turned out she was wrong. Way wrong.

They disdained her rules. And her cooking.

She suspected they didn’t like her. She wasn’t so sure she cared for them.

“Everything I knew about myself as a secure, healthy woman was being challenged,” she said.

So when the stepkids visited, she was often someplace else. At a business meeting. Or visiting with friends. Or, as a last resort, hiding out in her room.

After about 18 months of this, her husband finally broached the issue.

“Steve finally told me: ‘These kids care about you. You’re hurting them.’

“That woke me up. I had to do some soul-searching. I thought, ‘I need to start participating.’ “

Clurman, 47, has gained a lot of wisdom in the intervening six years. Much of it she has compiled in a new book, “Parenting the Other Chick’s Eggs: A Helpful and Entertaining Guide for How to Build a Strong and Loving Blended Family.”

It is comprised of narratives about her own experiences and questionnaires and exercises aimed at helping other families resolve their differences.

When Clurman finally decided to try to cultivate a relationship with her husband’s children, she immediately ran into an obstacle: There were no books out there to guide her.

“I could never find any books that were positive,” she said over the telephone from her Overland Park, Kan., home. “They were all negative, and I felt worse.”

At the time Clurman worked as a trainer, first for Fred Pryor Seminars, then for Hallmark. She was paid to provide other people with how-tos - how to motivate, how to hire and fire. Now she needed some herself.

So she went to the most direct source, and the only source, available: her stepchildren. How would they advise a stepparent to initiate a conversation with a stepchild? How to create a relationship?

“That brought great stuff out,” she said. “They said things like: ‘Be nice. Don’t be afraid. Try to learn what (we) like.’ “

It became apparent that feelings were better expressed in writing than in conversation, so Clurman began to design questionnaires and exercises for her husband, the children and herself. They were geared at teaching such interpersonal skills as assertiveness and conflict management.

“They started to really, really take. People started to notice a difference in our family and say, ‘What are you doing?’ “

Doing, or more to the point, not doing, or not expecting.

People in blended families are tempted to demand that everybody love everybody else - and right away.

“The question comes up a lot on the part of both the stepparent and the stepchild: ‘Do you really love me or are you just stuck there? Do you have to relate to me or want to relate to me?’

“I think it’s too much to ask of kids or parents to say out loud at first, ‘I love you.’ It might not be true.

“You just say, ‘I respect you and I’ll be kind to you, and that’s what I ask of you. I’ll be fair to you.’

“Almost anyone can understand those and wants to be those things.”

Eventually, if you’re patient and keep your expectations in check, she said, mutual respect may one day blossom into love.

It’s important also to allow stepchildren to love lots of people, especially lots of parental figures. The biological mother, for example, might think of the stepmother as “this interloper who’s after the love of my children.”

It’s crucial for stepparents to back off and not demand to be No.1.

“The kid has so many parents he doesn’t know what to do,” Clurman said. What many parents and steps don’t understand is that “the child can love any number of them.”

Clurman also learned the importance of communicating rather than assuming - and of giving her husband’s children a role in making rules and decisions.

More than once Clurman spent hours in the kitchen putting together what she thought was a magnificent meal, only to see the children pick and whine.

She’d assumed that her idea of a good meal was theirs. Hmmm, maybe chicken fingers would have been the way to go.

Experience also taught Clurman that rules are more often obeyed when the family as a whole agrees on what they are. A high school teacher for 17 years, she’d been accustomed to a lot of authority, to establishing rules herself.

When she told Steve’s children they could under no circumstances eat on the fabric sofa or play anywhere other than their rooms, the basement or outside, they didn’t take it well.

These past eight years have been an education - and an evolution - for Clurman.

“I went from feeling like an outsider to feeling very much as if I’m a part of this,” she said.

She changed her will recently to include her stepchildren. She tells them, “I love you.” And there’s no doubting she means it.