Excerpted from
The Complete Book of International Adoption: A Step by Step Guide to Finding Your Child
By Dawn Davenport

International adoption is not for the fainthearted, and a strong constitution is needed more at the paperwork stage than at any other stage so far. Your agency is the expert on exactly what is needed, and they will guide you. Although it looks daunting, trust me, the process is more tedious than difficult, and you simply have to plod your way through. How long the process takes is mostly up to you. I've interviewed people who have completed it in less than a month and others who have taken over six months.

Before I address the specifics, allow me to preach for just a moment. Try not to view the seemingly endless paperwork as a roadblock being put in the path between you and your child. Try, as hard as it may be when you are standing in line yet again in front of your friendly (or not) neighborhood notary, to see these requirements as the governments', both domestic and foreign, honest attempt to make sure that these children go to the best possible families. For our children to have a positive self-image, it helps for them to have a positive image of their country of birth and adoption. One of our jobs as adoptive parents is to help our children understand that there were people in their birth country and in the United States who cared about them and wanted the best for them. They were not unwanted discards being rescued by noble Americans; their country of birth wanted to find good homes for them and went to great pains to do so. The paperwork that you are preparing now is tangible evidence of this concern by both countries.

Also, think of it from the standpoint of the governmental officials in your child's birth country. It has to be difficult for them to read in their newspapers about a horrible incident involving one of their children adopted abroad. This is bad for them and bad for international adoption in general. All the paper chasing, all the notarizing, all the apostilling, and all the standing on your head and holding your breath is to ensure that the good guys in your child's home country can sleep at night. It's the least we can do for the gift they are giving us. Okay, the sermon is now over; please open your hymnals and get ready to sing "Bringing in the Sheets (of paper)."

International adoption is complicated because so many governmental fingers are in the pie. Prospective adoptive parents must comply with the adoption laws of the foreign country, the immigration laws of that country, the immigration laws of the United States, and the adoption laws of their state. A little-known law of physics (or would this be mathematics?) has established that paperwork and headaches increase exponentially with the number of bureaucrats involved. Although at first glance the requirements seem complex, as an adoptive parent here's all you really need to know.

A Boring (but Blessedly Brief) Legal Overview of U.S. Requirements

Your child-to-be is a citizen of another country. To enter the United States legally, all foreign citizens, including your child, must be processed as an immigrant. The keeper at the immigration gate is the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), which in the past was the INS before it was swallowed by the Department of Homeland Security. (For the trivia or acronym lovers among you, it was also known as the BCIS for a short time during the transition.) To further complicate the matter, the U.S. Department of State is also involved in international adoption, but not from the immigration and paperwork side of things, so I'll leave them out of the discussion.

The USCIS must issue a visa for immigrants to enter the United States, but fortunately they have a policy to expedite the processing of orphans. Don't get too excited about the use of the word expedite. When used by a governmental agency it does not necessarily mean fast, but in fact your child will be avoiding the usual long wait for a U.S. Visa. In order to approve a visa for your child, the USCIS must do two things. First, they must make a determination that the prospective adoptive parents are capable of parenting; and second, they must decide that the child is eligible to be adopted. Both of these tasks take time, but determining your parenting capability can be done before a child has been referred to you for adoption, thus speeding up the process once you find your child.

You will submit your forms to the USCIS office with jurisdiction over your area. To find the correct office, look up field offices at www.uscis.gov. The forms are also available at this Web site. You can fill out the forms directly online and print them off for submission. There is surprising van a ti on in exactly what each USCIS field office requires. For example, some offices require that the home study specifically name the guardians selected by the parents, but other offices require only that the home study state that guardians have been selected. Some offices require that the child-abuse check be attached to the home study, while others require only that the home study state that the check was clear. There is also a great deal of variation in how fast each office will process the forms. Your home-study preparer should know the nuances of your particular USCIS office.

Excerpted from
Parenting the Hurt Child : Helping Adoptive Families Heal and Grow
By Gregory C. Keck, Ph.D., Regina M. Kupecky, LSW

PLEASE NOTE: In order to prevent confusion, we have chosen to use the masculine gender when referring to generic situations throughout this book.

The face of adoption continues to change. Gone are the days when the policies of social-service agencies forbade foster parents to get close to their foster children, and when nurturing was to be reserved for the yet unidentified adoptive family. Gone are the days when the accepted belief was that withholding love and attention from an infant or child would serve him well.

As the winds change course through the adoption and child welfare world, children no longer have to be subjected to imper-manence or frequent moves from foster home to foster home while awaiting the phantom magic of reunification. They can finally reap the sensible rewards of a fact that we have known for years: children need to be in one place with loving, protective, and nurturing people - whether birth parents, foster parents, adoptive parents, or kinship parents.

Today foster parents are encouraged to "keep" the children they have. So widespread is this updated belief that youngsters in foster care are now more likely to be adopted by their foster parents (64 percent) than by relatives (14 percent) or new adoptive families (21 percent).

The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 goes a long way toward addressing the many shortcomings of the earlier system. This law finally recognizes the critical need for permanency in a child's life and mandates that states move more expeditiously to obtain permanent homes for foster children. As a result, the number of finalized adoptions from foster care has soared - from 28,000 in 1996 to 42,375 in 1999.

And the numbers will continue to grow. Irresponsible parents can no longer spend year after year ignoring the reunification expectations of their case plans, while their children move around the foster care system like endless chain letters.

No longer do agencies have to wait until the birth family does something injurious to an infant or child before removing him. If there has been a clear pattern of parental irresponsibility with other children, the state may now proactively protect a newborn. Social workers are freed from old laws that protected the rights of the birth parents while simultaneously endangering the lives of their innocent children.

The trend toward change is far-reaching. It is estimated that 16,396 children were adopted internationally by American families in 1999 - an increase from 7,093 in 1990.3 Many people pursue this path in an attempt to adopt a child who has not been hurt or damaged, but the child may be as hurt as a child from foster care. Most adoptable children from other countries share the same traumas as those experienced by children in our own system. The abandoned children found wandering the streets of Moscow most assuredly have not had good lives. In all probability, they were subjected to abuse, neglect, and sexualization, as opposed to nurturing, stimulation, and security.

Abandoned infants everywhere in the world have had identical experiences, and the motivation for the abandonment is irrelevant. Whether the child's mother left him in China due to sociopolitical reasons - or if he was dumped in a U.S. high school bathroom because his mother was terrified to tell anyone about her pregnancy - the end result is the same: the infant was abandoned by the woman who gave him life.

While we are not suggesting that people avoid inter-country adoptions, we simply want to make it clear that most adoptable children - regardless of their country of origin - have experienced trauma. We also want to point out that the fear of a U.S. family reclaiming a birth child is not a sound sole motivator for seeking an international adoption. For the most part, there are very few situations in which a birth family regains custody of, or contact with, the child. This is particularly true of children adopted from the foster care system.

As changes in the adoption world continue, we are pleased to see the formal recognition of kinship placement. While this practice has always existed informally, families related to a child are now able to adopt him and receive the same kind of support - subsidies, medical care, and so on - that nonrelative adoptive families have always enjoyed. This movement opens up significant options for many children and negates years of undefined, nebulous existence in the foster care system.

Certainly, kinship families should be considered when they offer the child a chance for a secure, protective, and nurturing childhood. However, one should not assume that a new trend equals a solution for every case. Kinship placements may be superb, but they can also be abysmal, because there is not always a positive relationship between a biological tie and quality care. Kinship placements must be evaluated, utilizing the same factors as those employed in nonrelative placements. An aunt who is unknown to the child is more of a stranger than the foster family with whom the child has been living for two years. We think it is unwise to move a child simply because a blood relative has surfaced and indicates an interest in adopting him. This kind of thinking does not take into account some common-sense factors, even though it may flow with the current trend.

As we celebrate the numerous, positive changes that have occurred for hurt children, we must remain focused on a commitment to keep this process moving. Perhaps one day, a child who is removed from an abusive home will be able to have his first out-of-home placement as his final placement. While this may be a lofty goal, it may help the system refine its practices to enable children to "get where they're going" as quickly as possible. What's more, it will ensure that the child has the potential to experience continuity in his development. And that alone will reduce the lifelong difficulties for parents and their hurt children.

Helping Your Hurt Child Heal, Grow, and Develop

In the six years since Adopting the Hurt Child was published, we have been asked repeatedly about writing another book. Of course, we were flattered, but the mere thought of the undertaking was daunting.

Now we feel the time has come. We want to add to the information we have already imparted and give parents more tools to help them raise their hurt children. The past six years of ongoing work with families have given us new insights, ideas, and strategies that we want to share with parents to help their children heal, grow, and develop.

We want to make it clear that foster and adoptive parents are not responsible for the development of their children's problems. But they are responsible for creating the proper environment for change, the motivation for growth, the direction for improvement, and the security needed for comfortable attachment. Their roles are extensive, and if they are not fulfilled, their children cannot get well.

Parenting a hurt child may not be the kind of parenthood that some people envisioned when they responded to an advertisement about adding to their family. But anyone who wishes to take on the responsibility of fostering or adopting a child who has had early trauma needs to understand precisely what is to be expected. Once the choice is made to proceed, parents must know what they can do to help their new child heal.

It is our intent to give them information that will prepare them for troublesome - even dark - moments and to arm them for a loving battle. Many parents feel as if they are in combat, and most of them had no idea this is what the social worker meant when she said, "Jamie can be challenging and energetic."

Parenting hurt children can be difficult. But it can be less difficult . . . more fun . . . more effective . . . and more productive when you know who you are parenting and how to do it best. While your child may not always feel your help - or may not let on that he does - this is a normal part of the process. After all, how many of us recognized and appreciated what our own parents were doing for us as we were growing up?

As more and more adoptions of hurt children take place, there is a critical need to prepare the new parents for the challenges they will face. They require support from both the professional and the lay communities, because they are often misjudged and misinterpreted.

Early on, people speak of them as "saints." As time goes by, the child's disturbance begins to emerge. The parents' struggles and frustrations are revealed, and people pull away. They become judgmental, nonsupportive, and unsympathetic. These once "saintly" families withdraw, afraid to tell people what they are really going through. They think, "Who will understand?" "How could such a sweet child possibly be so much trouble?" "How could such a young child cause enormous turmoil among family members?"

These difficult situations are the ones that led us to write this book. We want to explore every option that will help families help their children. We want to enable parents to understand the very things that cause them distress . . . that cause them to reflect upon their capacity to parent. We want to give them as much hope as possible and to share some very specific strategies that may help make their journey smoother, more productive, and more enjoyable.

No single technique will solve all problems. There are no "tricks" that will abolish the hurt the child has experienced. There are no strategies that will completely alleviate parental stress. Parenting a hurt child is a journey filled with surprise, pain, uncertainty, episodic joy, unparalleled excitement, and an ongoing sense of wonder - wondering what is just around the corner . . . wondering just how long the peace and love will last . . . wondering when the next crisis will hit.

When the carousel of placements finally stops, the roller coaster ride begins. We hope that what we have to share will give you the hope, strength, courage, and commitment to endure the ride with all of its unexpected turns and bumps. If you are able to complete the journey, you will have helped your child heal and grow. In the process, it is inevitable that you, as a parent, will also grow. We hope that what we have to share will inspire you to tap into your own resources and creativity and will allow you to become the parent you always wanted to be.

As you read this book, keep in mind the following facts. They will serve you well as you begin to understand parenting the hurt child.

• Parenting hurt children requires loving patience and clear expectations for improvement.
• Parenting hurt children is frequently painful.
• Hurt children bring their pain into their new families and share it with much vigor and regularity.
• Parents who did not cause the child's trauma often suffer the consequences of it.
• Even though the child may seek to anger the parent, children will not be able to securely attach to an angry parent.
• Anger prevents healing.
• Nurturing will promote growth, development, and trust.
• Parents do not need to have a consequence for a child's every misdeed.
• Family fun should not be contingent upon the child's behavior.
• Parents should expect difficult times, as well as a reduction of them.
• Parents must spend time - lots of it - with their children.
• Parenting involves sacrifices.
• While parents must take care of themselves, that care cannot be at the child's expense.
• Parents and children pay a price when parental shortcuts are taken.
• Expectations are more effective and powerful than dozens of rules.
• A child's history isn't only in the past. It affects the present and the future.
• Parents need to determine what information is private and what can or should be shared with people outside the family.
• Strong parenting does not need to be mean-spirited parenting.
• Angry parenting will help keep the mean child mean, the wild child wild, the scared child scared, and the hurt child hurt.
• If your child is from another country, his hurts and losses are the same as those of a child from the United States.
• Hurt children get better when their pain is soothed, their anger reduced, their fears quelled, and their environment contained.
• Reparenting is what hurt children need, regardless of their chronological age. Going back to pick up some pieces will be necessary before moving forward.

Who Is the Hurt Child?

Understanding the Attachment Cycle

For those who have read Adopting the Hurt Child or have a good understanding of attachment issues, this chapter - condensed, with permission, from our first book - will serve as a review. For those new to the topic, this will provide an introduction to the hurt child.

There is a common children's verse that says, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." For the abused child, nothing could be further from the truth. While the effects of physical abuse usually heal over time, the psychological insults experienced by the child bring deep, long-lasting pain. These wounds fester within, creating ongoing difficulties for both the child and the adoptive family.

Many adoptive children did not experience early childhood trauma, neglect, or abuse. In these cases, the issues they face are common to all children and are supplemented by issues related directly to adoption. But for adoptive youngsters who lived through a difficult start, there is a range of developmental complications tied to the abuse, trauma, or neglect.

The problems that adoptive parents often see in their children are most likely the result of breaks in attachment that occur within the first three years of life. This condition is often diagnosed as Reactive Attachment Disorder, which impairs - and even cripples - a child's ability to trust and attach to other human beings.

Often mothers understand attachment issues before fathers do. This is because healthy children first attach to their mothers - beginning in the womb. Most adopted children blame the birth mothers for their abandonment, abuse, and/or neglect, and target adoptive mothers with their most negative behaviors.

At the beginning of Lara's assessment, her father said he thought his daughter was fine, and the problems were all in her mom's head. When Lara was in session, both parents watched on a video monitor from another room as the child manipulated, swore, lied, and tried to prove to the therapist that she was the boss. "Daddy's little girl" was showing her true colors, and her father admitted, "If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it." Lara's mother was vindicated, her father was forgiven, and the family could begin to heal.

Attaching During The Critical Years

Most professionals who work with and study the process of bonding and attachment agree that a child's first eighteen to thirty-six months are of vital importance. In a healthy situation, this is the period within which the infant is exposed to love, nurturing, and life-sustaining care. It is the time when the bonding cycle is repeated over and over again:

• The child has a need.
• He expresses that need by crying, fussing, or otherwise raging.
• The need is gratified by a caregiver, who provides movement, eye contact, speech, warmth, and/or feeding.
• This gratification leads to the development of the child's trust in others. When abuse and neglect occur, they can interrupt the attachment cycle - leading to serious problems in the formation of the personality and most likely affecting him throughout adulthood. When the cycle is not completed and repeated, difficulties may arise in critical areas, such as
• 
  Social/behavioral development
• Cognitive development
• Emotional development
• Cause-and-effect thinking
• Conscience development
• Reciprocal relationships
• Parenting
• Accepting responsibility

Symptoms of Reactive Attachment Disorder

A child born into a dysfunctional environment that features abuse and neglect as overriding themes will not experience the attachment cycle with any predictability. As a result of this attachment interruption, he may exhibit many - or perhaps all - of the following symptoms:

• Superficially engaging and "charming" behavior
• Indiscriminate affection toward strangers
• Lack of affection with parents on their terms (not cuddly)
• Little eye contact with parents (on parental terms)
• Persistent nonsense questions and incessant chatter
• Inappropriate demanding and clingy behavior
• Lying about the obvious
• Stealing
• Destructive behavior to self, to others, and to material things (accident-prone)
• Abnormal eating patterns
• No impulse controls (frequently acts hyperactive)
• Lags in learning
• Abnormal speech patterns
• Poor peer relationships
• Lack of cause-and-effect thinking
• Lack of conscience
• Cruelty to animals
• Preoccupation with fire

When faced with these behaviors, the pain and heartache experienced by the adoptive parents cannot be underestimated, nor can the hope that comes with identifying this disorder. From identification comes treatment that can fill in the child's developmental gaps and allow him to grow to maturity.

Jason was removed from his neglectful birth mother when he was a year old and was placed in a very nurturing foster home before being adopted at age two and a half. By the time he was six, he was hitting and biting his adoptive mother and other authority figures. His past neglect - coupled with his unexpressed anger and sorrow over leaving his foster home - resulted in his becoming a very troubled child. Even though his history had few moves and much nurturing, he was still a child with unresolved loss issues that impacted his attachment.

Effects of Abuse and Neglect

Even before a child is born, the building blocks of development are being laid. During the critical nine months that the child is within his mother's womb, he must receive sufficient nutrition and be free of harmful drugs if he is to develop into a healthy baby.

Many of the children who hurt were born to mothers addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. These children can be viewed as life's earliest abuse victims, because prenatal maltreatment may have prevented some of their physiological systems from developing properly. Oftentimes they are not primed to attach to a caregiver. Impeded by immature neurological systems, they are often hypersensitive to all stimulation. They do not like light and may perceive any touch as pain. In fact, any child in chronic pain, even when nurtured by the most loving caregiver, may develop attachment disorder as the pain short-circuits his ability to attach.

Sadly, a baby born with fetal alcohol syndrome or with drug-induced problems is most often tended to by a substance-addicted mother who is incapable of providing even basic care. The infant's heightened sensitivity and irritability may set him up for further abuse or neglect, because the mother faces the added challenge of parenting a baby who is often fussy and upset.

Children placed into an orphanage shortly after birth receive little one-on-one care. No matter where in the world the orphanage is located, this early placement can affect a child's development and create attachment issues.

Whether the abuse and/or neglect occur in utero or after the child is born, the results may be similar. The attachment cycle breaks, and the likelihood of attachment disorder is great. Without the intervention of proper therapy, this emotional condition can create problems for a lifetime.

Mike was ten months old when he entered foster care as a fail-ure-to-thrive child. By the time he was adopted at the age of three, the physical traits of failure-to-thrive were gone. But his anger remained. He came to us at fifteen after multiple treatments, including counseling, anger management, day treatment, residential treatment, and in-home therapy. When we showed him a photograph of a failure-to-thrive child and explained where his anger came from and where it belonged, he began to change and join the family.

Choosing the Right Kind of Therapy

To maximize the effectiveness of therapy for a child with attachment difficulties, treatment must be directly related to the problems that the family and the child are experiencing. Specific problems warrant specific solutions, and boilerplate methods serve no purpose. In most cases, finding the right therapist to point out the right path is the first step toward family harmony. We continue to hear complaints from adoptive parents stating that mental health professionals blame them for their children's current problems. It is an unfortunate fact that many of those who attempt to provide treatment to adoptive parents with disturbed children know very little about issues related to adoption and are not well versed in the potential damage that early trauma can cause. This is particularly alarming when we realize that besides failing to provide effective therapy, these well-meaning professionals solidify the child's existing pathology and complicate subsequent therapeutic efforts. It is not unusual for us to work with families who have seen four to six mental health professionals with little or no results.

DETH, ADOPTED AT AGE EIGHTEEN MONTHS, IS NOW TWENTY-FOUR YEARS old. She was in treatment with a psychologist to discover why she had such a hard time making commitments - to both other people and to a job. She suspected that her early life had impacted her adult life, and she began to educate her therapist about adoption and attachment issues. Finally, she became frustrated with his comments, such as, "I didn't know that," and "Can I borrow your books?" Ultimately, she grew weary of spending her money to educate her therapist and switched to an adoption-friendly professional who soon had her on the right road.

The reason for this ineffectiveness in treatment is startling in its simplicity. While graduate training enables therapists to deal with the neurotic personality, it does not adequately prepare them to deal with children who have not yet made it to a developmental level that is complex enough to be neurotic.

What Makes Therapy Fail

Young people with developmental delays - whether social, psychological, or cognitive - tend to be extremely skilled at figuring out the traditional therapist's goals and style. They effectively assume the role of victim, and the therapist responds with sympathy. Rarely does a clinician challenge a victim child, which is precisely what needs to be done when the child is faking it. When the therapist buys into the victim positioning, his sympathetic response serves to empower the child - and disempower the parent.

To compound the situation, many children who have experienced neglect, abuse, and abandonment have not yet developed an internalized set of values by which they judge themselves and others. They are not able to receive and experience empathy - nor can they develop insight - so they tend to project blame onto others and onto objects. They blame their adoptive parents for causing their anger, and they blame toys for breaking. They blame things that could not possibly be responsible for anything!

Most often, children or adolescents who engage in projecting blame have not yet developed a conscience. They become adept at engaging others in a superficial manner, amplifying the distorted reality that exists with their therapists. They even manage to draw teachers and others into their web of delusion, making these outsiders to the family feel that these "poor children" are quite easy to be around and are truly misunderstood by those who should know them best - their parents.

Many professionals are quick to endorse the helplessness of these children and their lack of social competence. While the young con artists are initially satisfied with their success at hooking yet another adult, they will ultimately hold him in contempt for "being so stupid."

Scores of therapists have fallen into this category and will be of little help to the child and his family if they continue to blame the parents or the family system for the child's difficulties. Character-disturbed children and adolescents are highly skilled in engaging the therapist when it should be the other way around.

It is an interesting dichotomy that the same therapists who are easily taken in by disturbed children find it difficult to work with the parents. Because their efforts are focused on helping the parents understand and tolerate the child, the implied - and sometimes direct - message is that the problem is one of parenting.

When parents are influenced to feel that their own issues are to blame, they may assume the "I need to change" role. Even when they objectively know that they were perfectly functional prior to becoming adoptive parents, they may be seduced into identifying themselves as the ones who should change. When their thinking no longer matches their experiences, they can feel crazy.

Mary, a single mom, adopted three children. "If one more person says what a saint I am, I may kill them! I feel like I want to kill these children at times, and I'm doing the best I can. When they tell me I'm a saint, I feel like a fraud. No one knows how angry I get at times."

Many parents with whom we have worked describe years of nonproductive therapy. At the suggestion of therapists whose empathy focused solely on the child, they kept charts of chores, doled out rewards and stickers, and imposed monetary fines. They compromised their values, altered their expectations, and skewed their rules. They were therapeutically robbed of their parenting roles, resulting in an unexpected shift of power from them to their troubled child. Once this occurred, there was little reason for their child to change.

After many failed attempts at therapy, adoptive parents frequently become defensive, guarded, and overly controlling in their relationships with therapists. Once this happens, the parents are likely to look as if they are, indeed, the ones who need help. We often ask parents, "Did you feel and act this crazy before you adopted Bobby?" When we approach them from a humorously empathic point of view, we generally get a response such as, "Finally, we've found someone who understands!"

What Makes Therapy Work?

In order to help the child with attachment difficulties, it is necessary to provide therapeutic support to his adoptive parents, as well. This serves a twofold benefit:

• To counteract years of minimization and disbelief by mental health professionals, teachers, social workers, and extended family members

• To enable parents to receive, process, and utilize the information the therapist gives them, because it is presented in an atmosphere of support

Let's face it - anyone will listen and respond more positively to an ally than to someone who is placing blame. What's more, they will be more open to making any necessary changes in their parenting techniques.

When the Smiths came to our center after internationally adopting two siblings, they were in crisis. Their adoption agency was bankrupt, and their extended family was uninterested in the children who weren't, after all, "real Smiths." The mom was angry, and the dad was in denial. As part of their treatment, we suggested that they join our support group for parents of children with attachment disorder. The other mothers rallied around the new mom, while the fathers quickly nudged the dad into reality. Soon they were able to laugh about the antics of their children and could hardly wait to share stories and solutions, and get advice from others in the group.

When working with adoptive parents, we always make it clear to them that they are not responsible for the problems their children have. They are, however, responsible for doing what they can to help alleviate them. While we don't blame them, we do expect them to assume a role that is strong, committed, resilient, and persevering.

The support we give is not carte blanche. While it is the parents' right and responsibility to call the shots in their families, it is our responsibility to help them make appropriate changes in their interactions with their children that coincide with our therapeutic work.

We are constantly amazed at the reports we hear about therapists who treat children without informing the parents of what happens in therapy. The parents of our young clients are always involved - either by their presence in the treatment room or in the observation room. Although we have high regard for the confidential nature of some therapy, we firmly believe that parents of character-disturbed children must be aware of what we are doing.

We are honest with the child, as well, and our openness has always proved effective. The hurt children with whom we have worked respond well to a contract that states, "Your parents are important people in your life. Because we believe they are the best people to help you, we want them to know everything that goes on in our work. There are no secrets here, and there will be no secrets about what goes on at home."

Excerpted from
Stepfamilies
By James H. Bray, Ph.D., John Kelly

Dozens of studies, including our own, have shown that the principal challenge of stepfamily life is building an emotionally satisfying marriage.

What makes this the paramount challenge for couples like the Goldsmiths is the changing nature of marriage-or, perhaps more accurately, the change in the reasons that people marry. Unlike men and women in earlier generations-who married for a variety of practical reasons, chiefly financial security-today people marry out of a desire for personal fulfillment: for happiness. This motivation is as active for men and women entering a second marriage as it is for those entering a first, and it accounts for a correlation we saw again and again in the study.

Marital satisfaction almost always determines stepfamily stability. If satisfaction is high, tolerance for the normal tumult and conflict of stepfamily life is correspondingly high. If satisfaction is low, tolerance for conflict is so low that often the stepfamily dissolves in divorce.

In a recent book, psychologist and family therapist Patricia Popenow describes the qualities that make a marriage satisfying. Her list includes shared values, shared rituals and gestures, a common problem-solving style, a similar way of looking at the world, and also the small daily acts of self-sacrifice that signal an individual's willingness to put "we" above "me." Dr. Popenow calls this group of characteristics the middle ground of a marriage, and she finds that this middle ground operates on two levels, both of which enrich the husband and wife.

On a practical level, a middle ground works like an instruction manual. Without consulting one another, the couple knows what should be done about a child, a bill, an annoying relative, or the guest list for Thanksgiving dinner. On an emotional level, the middle ground is the cement that holds a marriage together, makes it cohesive. The middle ground is the place where the husband and wife exist not as "you" and "I" but as "us."

New studies have supported Dr. Popenow's viewpoint. A thick, rich middle ground of shared values, beliefs, and personal styles is indeed what makes a marriage a successful, practical, and emotional partnership.

One reason for this is pride of joint authorship. Writer Pat Conroy once observed that every marriage constitutes its own unique civilization; the shared values and feelings, the similar way of looking at things, and the small acts of sacrifice that make up the marital middle ground are the symbols, language, and currency of Conroy's marital civilization. Thus, the couple that creates them is creating something truly unique, something distinctive to them and them alone-something that no two other people in the world could have created.

Additionally, a middle ground functions as a zone of comfort. It is the place in the marriage where each partner can go for companionship, understanding, solace, and laughter; the place where each partner can escape the constraints of individualism, can be something larger-something more important and meaningful-than simply "me."

The middle ground plays one other vital role in a marriage-it acts as a stabilizer. The enormous investment of time, effort, and personal commitment needed to construct a middle ground makes a couple think twice and then a third time before proceeding to a divorce court.

Typically, in a nuclear family, the middle ground of a marriage-shared habits, feelings, and outlook-is created in the leisurely, relatively stress-free period between wedding and parenthood. Thus, when the baby arrives, husband and wife already have in place an anchor-an incentive-to keep them together: something that makes the disruptions and dislocations created by the new child worth enduring During the dating period, people like Sarah and Jeffrey are able to do some construction work on their eventual middle ground. But a marital middle ground is so called because most of its construction must take place after-and inside-the marriage. And typically, in a stepfamily, the only interval between marriage and parenthood is the minute it takes the brand-new bride and groom to turn around and receive the congratulations of their children

What distinguishes Neotraditional couples from the two other stepfamily types is the way they use the four tasks of stepfamily creation to build a marital middle ground. In the course of developing an appropriate parenting role for the stepfather, separating a second marriage from a first marriage for the spouses who were previously married, managing change, and dealing with a nonresidential parent, Neotraditionalists forge shared values and a shared worldview-a clear "us."

The Connection between Marriage and Parenting

One key finding to emerge from our study was about the connection between the parenting task and the state of the marriage in a stepfamily. To put it baldly: Unless a couple succeeds at the parenting task-unless they find a comfortable parenting role for the stepfather-the marriage, and thus their stepfamily, is likely to falter Moreover, the reason for the connection highlights a key difference between nuclear and stepfamilies.

In a nuclear family, a troubled child has relatively little impact on a marriage, but a troubled marriage greatly affects a child, usually because marital problems interfere with good parenting, making a parent less sensitive to the youngster's needs. While a troubled child has less impact on the marriage, in a stepfamily, the interaction between marriage and parenting flows in the opposite direction. The state of the marriage has relatively little effect on a child because children generally have a limited emotional investment in a parent's second marriage. However, the child's emotional state has an enormous impact on the emotional state of a stepfamily marriage. The reason: Children who are unhappy misbehave, act out, are rude and surly; not only does such behavior makes life unpleasant for everyone, but eventually the unhappy child begins to divide the stepparent, who is discomfited and increasingly critical of the child, from the biological parent, who is defensive and increasingly annoyed at her spouse's criticisms of her child.

Among the steps a couple must take to solve the parenting task, two are particularly critical, and the failure of a couple to take them places their new marriage at risk. Indeed, in looking closely at the couples who divorced during the course of the project, we found that a full 50 percent of them had mishandled one or both of these steps

The first step is really a decision: when to integrate the new stepfather into the child's life. We found that many of our men, usually with a wife's encouragement, assumed an active parenting role too early in the marriage and thus fell into the trap of presuming an intimacy and authority that was still unearned.

This is the Good Father syndrome, and often its victims are left understandably baffled and hurt Here they are, truly behaving like a good parent: giving a child time and attention, direction and guidance; yet all they receive for their efforts is a spectrum of behaviors that increase in unpleasantness from reticence, to surliness, to outright rejection, with the rejection stage usually being characterized by slamming doors, loud shouting, and painful insults.

Initially my colleagues and I also were baffled by the Good Father syndrome. We routinely videotaped our stepparents and stepchildren interacting. During the first phase of the study I remember my growing dismay as I screened these tapes. I was seeing some remarkable examples of sensitive parenting, examples that, according to all the parenting texts, should have evoked delight and interest and engagement in a child. Yet, clearly, the stepchildren I was watching were reluctant and itchy.

Eventually the riddle of these children's unresponsiveness was solved. The answer lay in the child's initial wariness of intimacy-an inbuilt go-slow mechanism. We discovered that, during the first year or two of stepfamily life, the amount of intimacy or authority a child is psychologically prepared to accept from a stepfather is akin to the amount of intimacy or authority a child is prepared to accept from a coach, or camp counselor, or other friendly adult.

Fairly early in the project we noticed that Neotraditional families were more successful than our other families in integrating a new stepfather into the child's life. But, as with the Good Father syndrome, it took us a while to understand why. The answer was, in large part, realism. Neotraditional men were realistic enough to intuit what we social scientists needed months of study to discover: The child does not want a new parent.

In Neotraditional homes, the decision on how soon to integrate the man was always a mutual one-the result of a discussion where spousal differences were aired and resolved through compromise and concession. As we shall see in a moment, Neotraditionalists usually opted to foster an intimate father-child bond, the kind characteristic of a well-functioning nuclear family.

Excerpted from
Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew
By Sherrie Eldridge

Keep in mind that my knowledge and research is based mainly on adult adoptees who were damaged by the closed-adoption system. Nonetheless, I believe that their experiences teach us that the majority of adopted children need validation of their wound and loss. A parent might whisper to her adopted infant, "You must miss your birth mommy. We are sad too that you had to lose her." "It really hurts, doesn't it?" is a phrase that can be used by parents in every phase of the adoptee's life, for it demonstrates empathy and compassion.

A second thing adoptees need is education about adoption and its emotional and relational repercussions. As the leader of a support group for adoptees I see this need being met on a weekly basis, as adult adoptees learn more about the common emotional threads that unite us all. Shame falls away as self-disclosure grows. You can give your adopted child an early start on this kind of self-knowledge.

Adoptees need to learn to accept their wound as part of their life history-an unchangeable fact over which they have no control, but which need not cripple them in the future. This is one of the challenges of being adopted which, if accepted, can bring tremendous growth and maturity. Dr. Connie Dawson, adoptee, attachment therapist, and adoption educator, says, "When someone told me that I have suffered an irreparable wound, a burden lifted from my shoulders. In all my therapy, no one had ever told me that I couldn't wrap this one up neat and tidy ... couldn't fix it. Oh yes, I could lay gangplanks over the deepest parts so I wouldn't be swallowed up in its recesses. I could cauterize the edges to heal the rawness. But I couldn't fix it, if fixing means I take care of it and it goes away. It doesn't go away, neither does it have to be the ball and chain around my ankle. It doesn't have to make me feel I should apologize for who I am. It only means I'll take care of my own. And I will accept that this wound will continue to instruct me the rest of my life."

Another thing adoptees need is for their adoptive parents to put aside their own false guilt Parents who feel guilty are incapable of dropping their defenses and entering into their child's unresolved pain around the losses that neither parent nor child could prevent.

It is natural for adoptive parents to struggle with guilt when they hear about their child's wounds. Parents tend to search for the ways they could have prevented their child's trauma, often using the phrase "If only..."

• If only I had been there at the birth of my child.

• If only I had known the birth mother earlier and been able to nurture her.

• If only I had known more about adoption issues and how to handle them.

Any explanation, even at the cost of suffering guilt, may help adoptive parents cope with the desperate sense of helplessness they feel over their child's suffering. Cynthia Monahon, in Children and Trauma, says, "If a parent can find some way in which the trauma was her own fault, it becomes possible to believe that further trauma can be avoided. Guilt offers a kind of power, however illusory, over helplessness." Erroneous thinking like this is the beginning of false guilt and will interfere with the parent-child attachment if not recognized and dealt with.

The most important thing adoptees need is the freedom to express their conflicting emotions without fear of judgment. This is the final step toward healing, the one that brings release and freedom Psychologist and author Dr. Arthur Janov says in The New Primal Scream, "As children, we need to express our real feelings to our parents. We hurt if our parents are indifferent. If they force back our resentment and our rage, we hurt. We can no longer be ourselves and be natural. Our nature, therefore, is warped, and that causes pain. If you don't let an arm move naturally, if you bind it with tape, it is going to hurt. If you don't let emotions move naturally, you get the same result. The need to express feelings is just as physiological as hunger."

Adoptees need a safe place to share their feelings about adoption, both positive and negative, and to feel protected and loved unconditionally regardless of what comes out of their mouths. As a parent, you can learn how to create this safe environment within your home so that your child is free to express grief and conflicting emotions about being adopted.

As you practice listening to and responding to your child's pre-adoption loss, you will rid yourself of the barriers of defensiveness, guilt, and overprotectiveness that can keep you from being part of your child's healing. You will be ready to hear the second thing she wants you to know.

Excerpted from
The Things I Want Most : The Extraordinary Story of a Boy's Journey to a Family of His Own
By Richard Miniter

We met Mike at the children's home. I had envisioned an Army Reserve Center without the jeeps parked in front. Instead I saw a converted nineteenth-century Hudson Valley mansion, a sprawling multistory Tudor with slate roofs and stained-glass mullioned windows set down in carefully landscaped grounds.

And for some reason, that made me very edgy.

Inside was quiet-too quiet-and the interior matched the plush facade. We were ushered into a library room on the ground level with a bank of French doors opening on a bluestone patio that was shaded from the bright summer sun by awnings. The library was lined with oak paneling and hung with dark burgundy draperies. There are supposed to be eighty kids in here, I puzzled. Why isn't there any noise? There wasn't even a picture of a child on the wall.

Eerie. It reminded me of something. What?

Sue and I sat at the polished wide oval table in the center of the room along with Joanne and the group leader for Mike's team at the home, a straightforward, soft-spoken young man named Kevin.

Kevin spoke first. He wore a shy, awkward smile, not wanting to disappoint us, trying to choose his words carefully.

"Look," he said reluctantly, "I have to confess that I find it hard to agree with the purpose of this meeting. I want all of my children to have a home and a family. But Mike is difficult He can be very charming when he wants to, but he goes through cycles, weeks sometimes, where he's difficult, almost impossible to deal with. Just getting him out of bed in the morning can take an hour or two. Getting him back to bed at night can take even longer. He needs structure, a lot of structure."

That struck home. Structure was a key word in the Harbour training. Some of these kids had never had a regular bedtime, mealtime, or bathtime.

Yet that made me question the sort of structure our own children had had from us. Was it enough? Was there any to speak of? Years before we had built a house on Mountain Road in Rosendale, New York, twenty-five miles north of where we were now. It was a very secluded, wooded location up, as the name implies, on a mountain named Shawangunk. The six children had regular mealtimes and bedtimes, their clothes were washed and their lunches made every morning, but we also practiced something Sue called "benign neglect," and that meant in great measure the children working out their own lives. Susanne, the only girl, played with her go-cart and baby carriage on the front lawn or with an immense Barbie doll collection in her room. If she left the property, it was to walk down the road to her grandmother's Richard, the eldest, after an initial period when he explored the woods alone, either gravitated to his room where he read, also walked or biked down the road to his grandmother's, and often traveled much farther down to visit friends from school But the three middle boys, Henry, Frank, and Brendan, ran wild together on Shawangunk. Almost from the time they could walk they were in the woods together, and we never worried very much about them, although a few incidents still manage to dredge up a hefty feeling of guilt.

One of these was the lost locomotive.

The three boys came back one day and said they had found an old railroad engine in the woods I didn't believe a word of it. I had hunted much of the mountain for years and didn't remember anything at all like that.

But Henry, Frank, and Brendan led me right to it. Standing on a set of rusting rails where it had been abandoned just after the second world war was a cannibalized diesel locomotive, the small type that would be called a yard engine. It must have been used for logging. At one time there had been a narrow-gauge railway along the top of Shawangunk, but the land had long since reverted to hardwood and the roadbed was abandoned.

I was shocked. Not because I hadn't seen it before, but because it was miles from the house. Henry then was about ten, Frank eight, and Brendan six years old. I remembered peering down at them and saying, "You kids shouldn't wander this far from home." But the look I got back from all three would bother me for years. It was a sliding, sidelong appraisal that seemed to say, "You haven't the foggiest idea of what we've been up to and where we've been, and now that we've told you one thing, what do you do? You go and turn adult on us. Soooo, I don't think well be telling you anything else anytime soon."

"Don't give me that look," I threatened

"Sure, Dad," the three of them chimed back, smirking at each other.

And that was about the quality of the structure I had supplied for my own children.

Sitting there at the conference table with Joanne, Sue, and Kevin, listening to a lecture on structure, I said to myself, Richard, even if through some wild chance Sue wants to go further with this mad idea, you 're the last person a kid like this needs. You can't do this! Not you!

I turned to Sue and tried to get her attention, wanting to pull her outside where I could say all of this. But she was intent on Kevin, facing him with much the same look on her face as those three boys years ago in the woods.

Then I looked over at Joanne for help, but she refused to make eye contact. She had been through enough of these meetings that she could read the nuances like a book, and she knew I was getting even more hinky.

The four of us sat there with our own agendas. Sue wanted to rescue somebody, Kevin wanted to protect his charge from a situation he believed primed for failure, I wanted to be anywhere else, and Joanne, certain in her belief that Harbour offered this child one last shot at something like a normal life, was hoping against hope that the potential mother wouldn't tear this poor counselor's head off or the father go AWOL.

Excerpted from
Stepmotherhood: How to Survive Without Feeling Frustrated, Left Out or Wicked
By Cherie Burns

A husbands ex-wife is the woman most stepmothers love to hate. They relish the chance to have a go at her, and in some cases, she deserves it. Saying so is bound to get some backs up, but it's only fair that stepmothers finally have their say.

To hear stepmothers tell it, "She's (neurotic, batty, wacko, a real psychotic, absolutely nuts)." Pick one of the above. These descriptions characterize a large percentage of ex-wives floating around if you can believe what stepmothers tell you. While some of these exes may be certifiable lunatics, or in shaky emotional straits, it seems unlikely that they are all nuts.

Though it can be satisfying, there's no trick to badmouthing your husband's former wife. Stepmothers have an arsenal of personal dirt about her, provided by their husbands at a time when the worst things are better remembered than the best. God forbid that anyone with bad intentions should be privy to as much personal information about us-or anybody. It's not easy, and a few lapses are excusable, even therapeutic, but a stepmother is better off taking the high road when it comes to matters pertaining to her husband's ex-wife. (We might as well say "their" or "her" ex, since it seems as though you've both been married to her.)

If you can't resist taking a crack at her from time to time, go ahead, but know your company when you do so and don't expect anyone except another stepmother to enjoy it as much as you do. I know a couple who privately call their ex "Lovely," because her behavior isn't. It does them a world of good and it doesn't hurt anybody in a relationship where a little fun and irreverence are well earned.

Still, there is a serious side to having an ex-wife in your life. "A second marriage is always tied to the first, and the ex-wife relationship, especially where children are concerned, keeps the first marriage alive in the second," explains Lillian Messinger. To a stepmother, the earlier wife is a little totem of the past, a reminder of a life and love that went before. While the husband who knew her has few romantic notions left about his ex-wife, his new wife may create her own mythology about her: why he married her, why they split, why she doesn't braid her daughter's hair. Don't think too much; it simply doesn't pay.

But, of course, you can't forget about her. She does exist, and that's the problem. Stepchildren are a constant reminder of her. They usually mention their mother the way they'd trot out a prize collie for your inspection: to see how you react.

Even if the children don't mention their mother (which seems awfully artificial, if tactful), they're likely to escort her into your life in other invisible ways, like a communicable disease. Kids have an uncanny knack for this. They like to see you squirm a little, to spark a little drama. One stepdaughter reminded her stepmother every time she was within ten miles of the town where her parents were married of the significance of that location. Sure, it bugged her a little at first. Her weekend would have been complete without her narration of the geography. Hut once she got better at reacting to the reference, it went away.

It's surprising how many stepchildren know where they were conceived and how many make sure to tell their stepmother. Needless to say, it goes over like a lead balloon if they remind you, as one teenage stepson did when his dad and stepmother were headed for a vacation to the same spot, but it shouldn't be a big deal. Children are entitled to have a sense of their own history; nobody can take that away from them. The best strategy with stepchildren who indulge incessantly in such references is to ignore them or discuss the habit with them directly. Get off the defense and onto the offense.

Psychologists agree that there's not enough scientific research about the effect of ex-wives on stepmothers to allow many broad pronouncements about these relationships to be made, but they do advise second wives to avoid getting caught up in comparisons and rivalries. Ruth Neubauer, Ed.D., president of the New York Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, strongly suggests that second wives steer clear of competing with their exes. They should also, she adds, resist the temptation to style themselves to be better rematches. "Your real self will come through, so trying to be something you're not-or the first wife wasn't-isn't going to work," she maintains. It just pulls the knot of stepmother anxiety tighter.

Lillian Messinger states, "I don't think a woman can be in a second marriage without her husband sharing his history with her, but if she becomes obsessed about it, worrying about things like how big his ex-wife's breasts were, how she performed in bed, all the intimate details, it can become pathological. It isn't productive." Revisionist history can be just as deadly. Don't expect your husband to say that everything was terrible. There must have been some good times. If it had all been bad, there would probably be something wrong with him now, too.

A lot about being a stepmother has to do with being a second wife. Stepmothers feel powerless to affect matters that the ex typically controls, such as visitation, alimony, the upkeep of the children, and a slew of other often annoying arrangements and logistics that touch their lives regularly. An ex-wife's attempts to indoctrinate her children against their stepmother is also quite common. No woman can be expected to welcome this intrusion into her life. It is frequently hidden or impossible to anticipate at the start of a marriage. Divorced men typically appear to have lives of their own, but remarriage seems to activate their ex-wives and can release a penchant for bitchiness.

Carlin met her husband, Bob, after his divorce from his wife, Linda, who had left him. Their two children, nine and three, lived with Linda and her new husband eighty miles away. Bob religiously followed a visitation agreement that was part of his and Linda's divorce agreement.

Excerpted from
Stepcoupling: Creating and Sustaining a Strong Marriage in Today's Blended Family
By Susan Wisdom, LPC, Jennifer Green

Did you ever expect to form a stepfamily? If you're like most people, in your youth you imagined an enduring first union. If you've never married, you probably imagine a typical first marriage, with only each other to care for. This is the picture our society paints and perpetuates.

When you do stepcouple, then, how do you know what to expect? Your perspective about stepfamilies also conies from popular culture, your history, and your imagination. Unfortunately, TV shows like "The Brady Bunch" misinform the public. No Brady stepchild ever said, "You're not my mother. You can't tell me what to do." No Brady stepparent ever felt like an outsider, and no conflict lasted longer than twenty minutes.

Your background-your previous marriage, if you've had one, and your childhood experiences-influence your expectations about stepfamily life. You naturally plug the past into your map of the future, without realizing you're doing it.

Our culture, too, embodies strong values about families-namely that happiness comes from a nuclear family. When Mom, Dad, and a small flock of loving, obedient children reside in a household, cheer finds a permanent home. If you fail to recognize this as a table, you may believe that everyone who fits this mold has achieved domestic bliss. This paradigm, so ingrained in our culture as to be invisible, forms part of the standard against which you judge your new family. Evaluating a stepfamily by the standards you'd apply to a nuclear one is like grading an algebra exam with the key to a geometry final.

As a result-and whether you're aware of it or not-some of your initial expectations about yourself, your partner, your relationship, and your stepfamily are unrealistic. On the surface, your assumptions may sound reasonable. You're a mature, loving adult. You graduated from the school of hard knocks when you went through a divorce; if anyone's motivated to create a happy family, it's you.

You understand and love your children, so why shouldn't you understand and love your partner's children? Your spouse is bound to love and understand your darlings, too. By the way, you know what to expect from your children, and you expect his kids to behave the same way. It seems so logical.

Inevitably you'll notice a gap between your expectations and your experience. This gap is a source of the three Ds: disappointment, discord, and disillusionment.

Please note the distinction between unrealistic expectations and those that are appropriate in any relationship. You can expect that you and your children will be safe and that you'll be treated with respect in your relationship. If these basic expectations aren't met, you may have made a mistake in your choice of partner. However, you can't expect that your mate will anticipate and fulfill your every need, for instance, or cater to all of your children's caprices.

When you feel disappointed, you'll be tempted to point a finger at your partner or his or her children for letting you down. However, you need to learn to pause before placing blame.

For example, imagine it's the first holiday season that you're all together under one roof. Your previous holiday memories

are warm and fuzzy. Now you have a new life with someone you love deeply. The two of you shopped carefully and planned surprises, and the gift-wrapped coziness you long for seems just around the corner.

Then you find your spouse in tears, grieving the absence of holiday rituals her first family shared. Your children fight during a holiday dinner. Your youngest stepchild cries himself to sleep three nights in a row.

Are you disappointed? You bet. Afraid that every year will bring the same emotional upheaval? Most likely. Angry and/or hurt? Definitely.

Stop and remember that disappointment, discord, and disillusionment signal the need for healthy adjustment in your stepcouple and stepfamily. Be patient with yourself and your family. Over time, as a healthy stepfamily matures, the gap between expectations and experience narrows. Everyone becomes more free to enjoy the unique experiences that stepfamily life offers.

I'm afraid that I've made a terrible mistake. I feel guilty that I don't love my stepchildren. I tell them I do, but I don't. What's wrong with me?

One of the best ways to set yourself up for failure in a stepfamily is by expecting too much from yourself. A pitfall of stepcoupling is to assume that love for your stepchildren follows-or should follow-love for your mate as naturally as summer follows spring. Ideally, over time, you develop a positive, healthy relationship with your stepchildren, but it may not include feelings of love.

You feel obligated to love your stepchildren for a number of reasons. All stepparents are initially uncertain about how they'll fit into their new children's lives. As a result, you may act like a television version of a stepparent: loving, kind, and patient in the extreme.

Some stepcouples, particularly those in which a biological parent has died or become inaccessible, yield to the temptation to leapfrog the stepparent into the role of loving parent. In still other stepcouples, loving each others children is an implied condition of their relationship.

More generally, women feel pressure to conform to cultural expectations of being a good mother. Some women choose mothering as a proving ground in a new marriage. Both men and women may feel they have to perform for their spouses in the role of SSP-super stepparent.

You may also assume that your relationship with your stepchildren should be as close and loving as the one you have with your own children. While you may feel close to your stepchildren many years down the road, you'll always lack the biological parent-child bond that cannot be replicated. You won't share family history or the emotional and physical legacies that flow along bloodlines.

In reality, your relationship with your stepchildren grows over time, and no one can predict at the outset if it will eventually include feelings of love. Treat your stepparenting self more kindly by focusing on getting to know your new children as individuals, not worrying that you ought to feel differently about them. Instead of throwing a blanket of obligatory love over them, learn to understand them as people and appreciate their talents and other positive qualities.

Excerpted from
Remarried with Children: Ten Secrets for Successfully Blending and Extending Your Family
By Barbara LeBey

When children feel pressed to take sides, they may boycott a remarried mother or father, refusing to visit or to accept gifts from that parent. In extreme cases, adolescent and young adult children may refuse to even talk to the remarried parent or refuse to invite that parent who "betrayed" them to weddings, graduations, and so on.

Divided loyalties often appear where one of the parents has not remarried but is living alone. One fourteen-year-old girl refused to respond to her stepfather's good-natured parenting, believing, "We're a family, but my real father is alone. He has no one to care about him but me." That was her misperception, because actually her natural father was leading a relatively happy bachelor's life. But it's another example of how divided loyalties can manifest in a child's mind.

Steve, now thirty, was thirteen when his parents divorced. His father remarried and had another son with his second wife. When Steve got married, he refused to allow his father to bring his wife and their son to the wedding. When his father said he wouldn't come to the wedding under those conditions. Steve argued that the presence of his stepmother and half brother would ruin his mother's happy day. As a result, the father did not attend his son's wedding. Steve's loyalty to his mother precluded a positive relationship with his father and his father's second family. Steve's mother had certainly engendered these feelings, though Steve couldn't recall any particular words or actions that had led to his loyalty conflicts.

Divided Loyalties with a Layer of Guilt

Frequently, stepfathers remain uninvolved with stepchildren because they feel guilt for having left their own children. As one stepfather put it, "I have to keep my distance to avoid the feeling that I give my wife's children more attention than I give my own kids. They already feel I abandoned them."

A mother often feels pulled between her current spouse and her children from a previous marriage. Maureen divorced her first husband when their daughter was thirteen years old. A year later, she married her current husband and had another daughter with him. He had never been married before.

She says, "I feel a tug-of-war between my husband and my daughter from my first marriage. She sees me as the parent in charge, the one responsible for her. When my husband disciplines her or tries to influence, for instance, her choice of colleges, I feel torn. No matter what, I'm 'betraying' one of them. There's even a conflict on what to spend for each child. When my older daughter wanted a car, my husband refused, saying it was an unnecessary expense, though I felt she deserved to have a car. It seemed only fair, since I have my own money, plus the fact that her natural father has offered to help pay for it. She's a good student and a responsible person, but I don't know what I can do to please both of them. My husband gets jealous if I take her side, and then tries to control the situation by having his way. He's punishing me for loving my own daughter and wanting her to have nice things."

Remarriage after the death of a first spouse brings its own forms of disloyalty and guilt. Remarried widows and widowers often have difficulty sharing activities, rituals, and experiences they used to enjoy with their deceased spouse. Sometimes they won't even talk to the new spouse about the first spouse, because they feel it's disloyal to reveal personal information.

But even a divorced spouse may feel protective of an ex. Janet becomes defensive whenever her current husband criticizes her ex-husband for making late child support payments or for failing to pay for the health care of the children from the first marriage. Janet feels her first husband was a basically good man who never had much education, but he had been her childhood sweetheart. "I feel as if my husband's criticism of my ex is directed at me for being stupid enough to marry a man who couldn't make a good living."

These are just some of the land mines that can strew the ground on which newly blended families tread. However, when you understand your partner's feelings about his or her past, his or her kids-and yours-you're better prepared to navigate the terrain. Leftover emotional baggage almost always resurfaces in a blended family, and it's likely that everyone involved is carrying at least one suitcase. Awareness that these problems are going to arise is a big step in the right direction. Making the assumption that they won't arise for you-and then being blindsided by these conflicts-is a sure route to failure. Having reasonable expectations can go a long way to defuse loyalty conflicts and guilt.

Home Is Where the Toys Are

There are those people who negotiate relationships on unconditional terms, hold all the trump cards, and seem to control everyone around them. One couple I interviewed had been previously married but did not have custody of their respective children. For many happy years, they seem to have escaped all the usual problems of divided loyalties, unreasonable expectations, guilt, and other burdens of the past. But wait!-circumstances have a way of changing.

Gerald is a frantically busy man, a senior vice president of a publicly held corporation. Like many men, he was reluctant at first to talk candidly about his personal life. He agreed to an interview, however, because he wanted to get some problems off his chest. As a corporate executive, he was accustomed to problem solving, and he had never before faced a situation in which he felt virtually powerless. His domestic life was in shambles. And he was distraught.

Gerald was in the midst of a department overhaul when we spoke. "There's not enough of me to go around" he began. "The calls from colleagues are just a minor part of my day. The interruptions from my wife, my ex-wife, and all the kids are about to drive me up the wall."

Gerald admitted to being at a loss in his role as stepfather to two teenage boys who had never wanted him in their mother's life. "Frankly, I can't wait until they both go off to college so I can have my wife back. The boys were supposed to live with their father, but these kids have a much more luxurious life at our house, so when they were old enough to choose who they wanted to live with, they chose us. They've got fancy cars, a big house, money in their pockets, and a mother who feels so guilty about breaking up their home that she virtually lets them get away with anything. If I try to discipline them, they just smirk, wait till I leave the house, then resume whatever they've been doing. And I've got my own kids to contend with as well. It's 'gimme, gimme, gimme' with all four of them, her two boys and my two girls. If it weren't for the kids, Arlene and I would be tine."

Gerald described his divorce from his first wife and mother of his daughters as a case of "uneven growth." She was totally dependent on him. "I gave her enough to keep her happy and moved out. Now she won't leave me alone-can't make a decision about anything without calling me. No wonder my daughters want out. too."

Arlene. Gerald's second wife, also wanted to explain why she divorced her first husband, the father of her two sons. When Arlene met Joe, she was working as an account executive with a high-powered Madison Avenue advertising agency. Joe was a psychiatric social worker. Within the next three years, their two sons were born, and Arlene decided to become a stay-at-home mom. The absence of Arlene's salary meant that they had to drastically reduce their expenses. They needed a bigger place but had to move to a smaller one. As soon as the boys were old enough to go to preschool, Arlene returned to work. Before long, she found herself dreading the end of the workday, when she had to pick up the children and go home. The boys became the focus of intense competition between her and Joe. He wanted athletes. She wanted academic wunderkinds.

"There's nothing more sanctimonious than a man who's been jogging for ten years," Arlene said. "His idea of success is to get the whole family running around all hours of the day and night, being chased by vicious dogs."

Excerpted from
Born in Our Hearts: Stories of Adoption
By Filis Casey

As far back as I can remember, I have known that I was adopted. For all of my fifty-three years, "being adopted" has seemed normal to me. Some people are right-handed, some people are left-handed, and some people are adopted. My cousin, who was my surrogate brother, also was adopted. Being adopted was no big deal to me.

I had no reservations about telling anyone I was an adopted child. In fact, during my dating years, telling a girl that I was adopted could even score a few points! "Being adopted" also got me out of a couple of ninth-grade biology parent survey, hereditary homework assignments.

My adoptive parents never spoke about my birth parents or the situation that brought me to the adoption agency. My only curiosity was wondering what time I was born. I remember my parents saying that they tried to find out, but a fire had destroyed my birth records. I don't know if this statement was just a ruse to quell my curiosity about my birth history.

In retrospect, it is odd that my cousin and I never discussed any issues about our adoption. I have heard about adoptees who had a strong, primordial desire to search for their birth mother, feeling they could not be whole unless they uncover their roots. I never felt that way.

I don't recall even once really wondering about my birth parents. I never asked myself, What were the circumstances of my conception? How did my mother feel giving me up for adoption? What role did my birth father take? How did they feel afterwards? Do they ever think of me?

Once in a while, though, I would fantasize about them. A recurring fantasy was that one day I would receive a call from a lawyer asking me to come to his office. When we met, he would say, "I have been your birth fathers lawyer for many years. Your father always watched you from afar. He followed your athletic achievements and your career. He was proud of you. However, I am sorry to tell you he recently passed away. And by the way, he left you $25 million." I guess that is not much different than people dreaming of their "long-lost millionaire uncle." Later I was to find out that my birth father was a bus driver from New York City, and now all I can picture is that Ralph Kramden was my father. It's a bit of a letdown, I'll admit.

I have no idea why my adoptive parents did not give me more information. Were they afraid I would leave them if I found my birth parents? In the late 1990s my mother came up with a strange theory about my cousins and my trip to Europe on 1969 college summer break. Both my mother and his mother, knowing that our birth mothers were in Europe, thought we were really on a search for our birth family. Frankly, nothing was further from our teenage minds.

On the evening of May 29, 2002, I sat down to read the paper after being away for a couple of days on business. Noreen, my wife, and Andrea, my sixteen-year-old daughter, came into the room. Noreen sat down next to me and took my hand. Her touch, so light yet so heavy with apprehension, gave me a chill of foreboding. Noreen said, "Andrea is pregnant."

One can imagine the emotions that erupted, the questions that were asked and the answers that were given. From that moment our family's world changed. Within thirty seconds of dropping the three-word bomb, Noreen said, "Andrea and I think adoption may be the best answer." I had already started to ask myself, Could we raise another baby? The word "adoption" struck me like a lightning bolt. It seemed incredible to me that we would give a baby to someone else! But then I was adopted. Why couldn't it work here? All of these thoughts raged like a storm in my head, but I think my love for my daughter cleared my brain, and I began to search for the right answer. I did feel betrayed, hurt, angry and dumbfounded, but I tried to push those feelings aside.

Over the next days and weeks my own adoption came more and more to the forefront of my thoughts. Is this what happened to my birth mother and father? How did each one react? Did they tell their parents? Did their parents even know? What went through their minds? I started to ask all the questions that I had not even thought about during the first fifty-two years of my life. Not only was I dealing with the emotions of our current family situation, I also felt rising to the surface unresolved issues from my adoption.

During Andrea's pregnancy, we felt it was important that she receive counseling. We found an excellent counselor with extensive adoption experience, who was, in fact, also adopted herself. Mary Ellen was extremely helpful to Andrea. We were very concerned that the adoption alternative was Noreen's and my solution, but that deep down it might not be Andrea's choice. Mary Ellen did, however, confirm that Andrea felt that adoption was not only best for her but also for the baby.

Eventually, I started to feel that I could use Mary Ellen's counseling as well. We talked about the emotional aspects for the adoptive baby, and I learned that negative feelings experienced during adoption may manifest themselves later as depression, loneliness and anger. I realized that I have experienced these emotions and wondered if they related to my adoption.

Mary Ellen explained that adoptive children often suffer low self-esteem and feel unwanted. The child often feels "there must be something drastically wrong with me, because my own mother did not want me!" Another by-product is the child becoming afraid to form new relationships. The child, and later the adult, believes that if a relationship is started, then abandonment is right around the corner; thus, it is better to avoid being hurt by never entering into a relationship in the first place.

Mary Ellen and I talked about how my parents might have felt and how I had felt. I was in a foster home for nine months before I went to my new home, which must have been a lonely and confusing time for me. I must have thought, There is something very wrong with me, nobody wants me. Mary Ellen had a great cure for this troubling feeling. She made me picture myself as an infant and I, as an adult, holding that infant. She encouraged me to talk to him and enjoy him. When doing this exercise, it was impossible to think of that infant as bad in any way. The infant was an infant; he was pure, he was full of new life, he was happy. Concentrating on this picture and thinking of the feelings of my birth parents gave me a wonderfully new positive perspective on my adoption.

From that counseling session in May until the birth of Andrew on September 28, I relived my adoption, both from my birth parents' point of view and from mine. During that whole time I felt like I was preparing to give myself away. Whenever I spoke about the adoption, I cried. The process was difficult. In my own way, I became attached to Andrea's unborn child. At times, I thought that unborn child was me. I often questioned whether adoption was the right thing for the baby. Should we change our minds for the sake of the baby? Eventually, I concluded that adoption was still the best alternative for the baby and us, especially in the light of the adoption options available today.