Like a Second Mother

by Gwen Cooper — September 24, 2007

Once upon a time, a few years back, I was dating a man who was a few years older than I was and who had young children. Things looked kind of serious between us for a while, and so the issue of how to handle potentially meeting his kids came up quite often. As it turned out, we broke up before any introductions took place. But a good friend of mine is now also dating a man with two children—and finding herself embroiled in complications she's only slowly beginning to absorb.

You don't have to have had the experience of dating someone with children, or having been the child of a parent who was dating, to imagine the obvious relationship wrinkles the situation produces. Divorce is always tough on the kids, and their first choice is almost always going to be to see their parents get back together. No matter how much they may like a potential stepparent as an individual person, adjusting to the idea of a stepparent will inevitably cause the kind of unease that results in tantrums or cold shoulders or outright rejection.

My friend was prepared to deal with all of this going into the situation. What she's realizing now, however, is that dating a man with children also means that her boyfriend's ex is now an everyday part of her life. Understandably, the ex wanted to meet the "e;new"e; woman who might end up spending so much time with her kids. But her boyfriend, understandably, also talks to his ex nearly every day about things pertaining to the kids—everything from arranging after-school schedules to setting money aside for their college funds. When her boyfriend has had a rough encounter or an argument with his ex (something, I'm told, that occurs fairly frequently) my friend hears all about it. If the ex's schedule changes suddenly and her boyfriend is unable to drop work to pick the kids up, she's on call. She was prepared, in theory, to take on a relationship with three other people. But she's learning the hard way that there are actually four other people in her relationship.

I don't really have any advice to give her, because there isn't really a clear way out of the situation. For better or for worse, her boyfriend is going to be tied to his ex for the rest of their lives. The most she can do is learn to live with it.

On the flip side, the good news is that the kids really seem to have taken to her. "e;You have no idea how unusual that is,"e; I told her. "e;Winning over the kids is supposed to be the hardest part of a situation like this."e;

Two hurdles down, one to go.

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, recently published by Simon & Schuster. To read all of Gwen Cooper's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.