Not Step Parent But BONUS Parent

I've always disliked the term 'step-parent'. To me it seemed lesser. The original use of the word derives from an Old English word, steop, which means bereave. It was a term used for children who were orphans. Our daughter was never an orphan. Nor are most of the children who are in similar parental situations like ours.

Being a bonus parent is hard. At the beginning of my relationship with Kendrick, at least 90% of our arguments revolved around parenting styles. I was stuck in my ways. He was just developing his ways. It was not uncommon to retreat to a quiet place after our daughter went to bed and argue about a decision that was made regarding her. Typically, I was the defensive and angry one out of the two of us. I couldn't come to terms with the fact that I had to learn how to incorporate two styles of parenting into one. Rather, I didn't feel it was fair. After all, I was the one who raised her most of her life. How could he think that he knew what was best?

It became clear, rather quickly, that if we didn't work this out that our relationship would suffer and fall apart. Despite either of our personal feelings about parenting, we loved each other deeply. We wanted this to work. We wanted to be a happy couple and a happy family. So what to do?

We went to the source. Our child. Without asking her to choose sides, we talked openly about how she felt about how each of us handled situations. Her words came fast and clear, "you contradict Kendrick. He wants what's best for me but you think he's too harsh, but he really isn't."

Holy crap, was that a blow to my ego as a parent! To have my ten year old tell me that I was in the wrong was, at the very least...hard to hear.

From that moment on, I made it my goal to stop my contradicting, to let him take a more active role, to let him LOVE her (because that's also part of discipline) in his unique way. It was when I started doing that, that things became so much easier. In fact, having put my ego aside, I realized that he and I agreed on much more than I thought we did. He also forced me to look at things from different angles. For the first time as a parent, I realized that perhaps..just perhaps..I didn't know everything.

Bonus parents are given a hard job from the beginning. Not only are they walking into a situation that is typically born of things like divorce or the death of another parent, but they are viewed as aliens. No one will walk up to a birth mom and tell her that she's raising her kids wrong (usually), but family is quick to point out when they perceive a bonus parent is wrong or unfair. Sometimes, the kids are already coming from a tough situation and feel threatened by the bonus parent. In short, their job is much harder than people really understand.

Today, I was reminded of our hard work as parents, how blessed our daughter is for her bonus parent, and just how far we have evolved as a family.

Our kids are graduating and leaving home soon. My husband and I laid down and held each other while we cried together about the end of this era. Reminiscing, talking about what we will miss most, how things will change,

 It made me think back to the beginning of our parenting together, and it made me cry even harder thinking of the joy that he has brought me, our kids, and our home..because I gave him the room to be the dad that he wanted to be.