Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It's a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute, supported by listeners like you. I'm Dr. James Dobson, and I'm thrilled that you've joined us.

Roger Marsh: Welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast division of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Roger Marsh, sitting in the co-host chair today, and we have a very special treat, especially for those of you who are in a stepfamily or blended family situation. Yes, there is a difference.

Laura Petherbridge is with me today here on the program. Laura's an international author and a professional speaker on subjects related to singles and divorce and recovery and divorce prevention, stepfamilies, and more. You can find her information at thesmartstepmom.com, and we have that linked up at drjamesdobson.org. Today we're going to take a look at a brand-new book that Laura has written that offers timeless wisdom for blended families, and it comes straight from Scripture.

The new book is called Stepfamilies of the Bible, and we've got a link for it up at drjamesdobson.org. Laura Petherbridge, first of all, personally, it's really good to see you again. Welcome back to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk.

Laura Petherbridge: Thank you. It's so good to see you again, even if it's virtual.

Roger Marsh: Let's talk about this whole situation because you're always my go-to. I probably quote you more in stepfamily and blended family situations than anything else. But I realize this is not a ministry that you aspired to by any stretch of the imagination. Is that a safe assumption to say? A lot of people say, "Okay, well that's great, but how do you come across as having the expertise to speak on the stepfamily, blended family issue?"

For those who may not know your background, if you can take us on a 60-second jet tour of how Laura Petherbridge became one of the top voices, if not the top, in speaking about stepfamily and blended family issues.

Laura Petherbridge: Well, thank you. That's very gracious. I myself was in a home of divorce. I was a child of divorce, and so when I went through a divorce when my husband didn't want to be married anymore, my first husband, I started working in divorce recovery ministry. That was really where I landed. I knew God would take something that was bad in my life, the broken pieces, and use it for good if I learned how, if I let Him.

My earlier years in ministry were in divorce recovery. I was a featured expert on the DivorceCare DVD series. Then Ron Deal, who is a therapist who specializes in stepfamilies, Ron asked me if I would co-author The Smart Stepmom. At first, I was hesitant because I did not view myself as the poster child for stepfamilies or stepmoms.

I felt unqualified, but when I asked God, He just said, "Yes, I've put this together for you." And so when we wrote The Smart Stepmom, that book sold over 45,000 copies. That was obviously a good fit, and that's really what began my stepfamily journey. I married a man with sons who were 11 and 13 when we got married, and we will celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary in December.

Roger Marsh: Congratulations. That is absolutely phenomenal. We could go down that road of divorce and remarriage or widowhood and remarriage and how long second and third and fourth marriages last. But for your marriage here to be in the 40-year category, that is really tremendous and congratulations to you both.

Let's talk about those terms. I threw both terms out, and we kind of use them interchangeably in our culture: stepfamily and blended family. You and Ron probably would say we have different backgrounds because his situation was where his mom was widowed and then remarried. Talk about what a stepfamily is by definition and what's a blended family by definition.

Laura Petherbridge: When Ron and I each got started, stepfamily was pretty much the only phrase that was being used. A few years into it, then people started calling themselves blended families because they didn't like the word "step." They felt it sounded separated or segregated.

The only problem with that is that there is also another translation of that, which when some people say blended, they mean racially blended. They mean adoption and biological, or black and white, or any other combination of culture. For a while, people were a little confused by the difference between blended and step. Today, pretty much both mean the same thing. Interchangeably, you'll hear people, especially younger people, use the phrase blended because they don't like the phrase stepfamily.

Roger Marsh: In the culture, I think about the way families are portrayed. You and I can both relate to a time when we had those conversations about Cinderella and the wicked stepmother, and it just seemed there was always that negative connotation attached to the stepfamily.

I saw a shirt recently; my wife and I are in a second marriage for both, and so we blend our family even though our kids are old and grown, they're all in their 30s. I saw a guy who was wearing a shirt at a retail store somewhere, and on the front it said, "I'm a stepdad," and on the back it said, "Stepdads are the dads who stepped up." I liked that because there's a choice that has to be made in a situation like this. You're either going to say, "We are a family, these are my sons and daughters," or you're not. Favoritism is something you work through in your materials. Laura, brag on yourself a little bit about the resources you have available for stepfamilies.

Laura Petherbridge: The thing that you mentioned in that that is interesting, that many people don't know, is that kids, young or old, embrace a stepdad much more quickly and easily than they do a stepmom. You would not see a lot of stepmoms walking around with that shirt. They would agree with it. They would say, "Yes, I stepped up when maybe the mom stepped out or stepped away or is ill."

But you see kids, especially the videos that we see today with the kids saying, "Will you adopt me?" where the stepdad gives all these sweet videos online, Instagram or whatever, where the kid gives the stepdad a gift for Father's Day or whatever, "Will you adopt me?" Everybody's crying, everybody's happy. You don't see any of those videos with stepmoms.

It is very much so, and people don't realize that until they get into it. There's a lot of science that Ron did a lot of exploration of why that's true, but the reality is kids view a stepdad as a bonus, as a plus in their life, where they often view a stepmom as an interloper. You took our dad away. And so that's a whole another show, Roger.

Roger Marsh: It really is. I do want to get into the new book, but what's fascinating because people don't typically think, "If I'm going to the Bible, I'm going to the Bible for parenting, marriage, theology, obviously, eschatology, whatever it is." You don't typically think stepfamily, blended family. "Let me crack open God's Word and see what that looks like." But you've identified them; they're right there hiding in plain sight and oftentimes we don't.

When was the idea? You and I were talking before we started our conversation here on the program about the fact that this was a book not necessarily that you didn't want to write, but God really hounded you until you finished this book off. Talk about what that process was like.

Laura Petherbridge: I was at a writer's conference a number of years ago and the idea for this book came to me and I pitched it to several of the editors that were there and acquisition editors and agents, and they were all like, "Oh my gosh, that's a phenomenal idea. Nobody's written on that." When I went to do my comparison for a proposal, I couldn't find another book out there like it, and I still haven't been able to find one.

But it was hard. It was hard to write. It was hard to think, "Will people understand this? Will they read this? Will they grasp what I'm trying to do here?" What I finally realized was that I needed to take each chapter and tackle an emotion associated with stepfamilies.

And how these biblical people, ancient saints, how they dealt with the emotion that they were experiencing in their stepfamily, and the irony of how thousands of years later, here we are dealing with those exact same emotions: jealousy, rage, unforgiveness, fear, all of these emotions that are common to the modern-day stepfamily. Our brothers and sisters thousands of years ago were dealing with the exact same thing. Dynamics were different, society was different, but the emotions are exactly the same.

Roger Marsh: You mentioned all those emotions and, of course, the Old Testament didn't make things any easier because of the multiple wives and the handmaids and things of that nature. I love the fact though that you went right for the eye of the tiger initially, starting right out with jealousy and resentment. Abraham, Sarah, Hagar. That just looks like a soap opera. What an emotional mess.

And yet you realize that nowhere in Scripture where Abraham is looking at Isaac or Ishmael and saying, "I love you better than I love you." You can see where the women have that resentment. Talk about something maybe that you learned while doing the research for that part of the book and that is going to help people deal with overcoming jealousy and resentment in a stepfamily situation.

Laura Petherbridge: Sarah and Hagar are one of the most classic examples in Scripture of two warring women. I call it the war of the women. It is classic. I primarily work with stepmoms because my other books that I wrote after the one with Ron are primarily for the stepmom but also for stepfamilies. When I go out to a church or a convention or an event and I'm speaking on stepfamilies, of course a lot of stepmoms come, but the biological moms will also come to my workshop or to my class.

I then began hearing the most common things the biological mother was saying of why she's irritated with the stepmom. Occasionally when I would do these workshops and it was both the bio mom and the stepmom in the group, I don't often throw out, "Does anybody have a question?" because it can turn into World War III.

When I was trying to get them each to hear the other side, it was just fascinating to me how you could do a reality TV show with Sarah and Hagar today and it would be very similar to, "That's not your child. Stop trying to parent my kid." "But I care for your kid 50% of the time so I should have some say in that." "He's not your husband anymore, he's my husband." It really was shocking to me of how Sarah and Hagar and both of them, actually all three, throw in Abraham, all three of them did things that made the situation worse. If they had obeyed God and done what God told them to do, they wouldn't be in this circumstance even after the two boys were born.

So it's so interesting. That's why at the end of each chapter, I do a little caveat of what can we learn from this stepfamily and then what can my stepfamily learn from this stepfamily. So it's for anybody. It's not just for the stepparents because I get a lot of grandmas or sisters-in-law or sisters or brothers saying, "Hey, my brother is getting remarried and he's marrying a woman with kids or he has kids and I don't like the way the stepparent is treating my niece and nephew. I don't like the way the new grandparent is treating my child or my stepchild." This is a family affair. This is not just between the couple.

Roger Marsh: It's so interesting that there are people who are dealing with this now and not thinking, "I could learn something from this biblical example in this area," because it seems so contemporary, it seems like just a modern problem. And also too, you just spoke about the fact that there are people with free will who are making their own decisions. Some are Christians, some are not.

As we try to blend, a Gentile can be grafted into the olive branch, if you will, of our faith because physically that happens with olive trees. But when it comes to families, it's a whole different dynamic. You've got a younger generation coming up now thinking, "Well, I need to be happy and having fun all the time. So if I'm not, then it's got to be someone's fault. Well, it must be hers. She's my stepmom, I don't like her. She took my dad away." One of the common issues, talk about the issue of that rejection. What happens when there is that feeling, inevitably there's someone in the mix that says, "Dad got married or Mom got married again and I don't feel like I'm part of the plan." And it's not just teenagers with hormones. It could be young children, it could be adults saying, "I'm in my 30s, why did Mom need to marry this guy? I'm very concerned about her well-being." You used the example of Jacob and Laban's situation with his daughters.

Laura Petherbridge: And that's so important to get out there that we only think of kids struggling when they're little or young or adolescents or teenagers, and that is totally untrue. Many adult stepkids struggle when their parent remarries. You're hitting the nail right on the head when you say that it's the dynamic. People hate it when I say this, but I have to keep saying it: Stepfamilies are birthed on loss. They are not birthed on the same things a biological family are birthed on top of.

Because a stepfamily is birthed on loss, either a death, a divorce, or the severing of a relationship has had to have occurred in order for there even to be a stepfamily. If that hadn't occurred, it wouldn't be a stepfamily. Now I do get a lot of pushback when people are saying, "Well, my boyfriend or my fiancé, it was just a one-night stand so he wasn't in love with her." They think that doesn't matter to the kids, which is totally untrue. But to make themselves feel better they'll say, "Well, he didn't really have a relationship with her," or, "My wife, my fiancé didn't really have a good relationship with the father of her children and he left."

So dad's not in the picture anymore, and so they assume that that means the kids are going to be all happy about getting a step-parent. And that is not necessarily the case, and it doesn't matter what age. They've got to grieve the death of their biological family before they can move on to embracing a step-parent.

Roger Marsh: I want you to say that again. I don't mean to interrupt it, but what you said is so profound. The fact that whether Mom was widowed and is now remarrying or divorced and remarrying, the family unit that they knew that they grew up with is gone.

Laura Petherbridge: The death of the dream. The death of my family growing old together and Mom and Dad being there when I have children. You wouldn't believe how much chaos comes when a child or a stepchild has a baby. So now there's grandparents and step-grandparents. Some families will allow the step-grandma and grandpa to be right in, right part of the family. Other kids, they're like, "No, I don't want that person to be a grandfather to my kid. So you stay over there, and my kid's over here, or my mother or father's grandchild is over here. You're not a part of that." There are a number of reasons why they do that, but it's very painful.

Roger Marsh: I think we should rename the program Pandora's Box with Laura Petherbridge. My goodness, all these different questions are coming up. This is actually Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk; it's not Pandora's Box. But the tangled web, when you see that God's plan was a man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and the two become one flesh, they raise a family.

When there's any kind of disruption in that, then we see the chaos that can ensue. Laura, before we get back to your new book, Stepfamilies of the Bible: Timeless Wisdom for Blended Families, I want you to talk a little bit about your own experience because you mentioned at the start of the program you grew up in a divorced home, and then so you grew up with a stepmom as well as dealing with the issues there as a child. But then you married your husband and you're celebrating your 40th anniversary later this year, which is phenomenal, but you became a stepmom to his two sons. And I'm sure at some point you probably thought, "Okay, well I grew up in this kind of environment, so I know how this works." But the idea that you had it figured out, what were some of the surprises you encountered?

Laura Petherbridge: Well, you said it exactly right. I actually had two stepmothers and one stepfather. So my dad remarried two more times, one was when I was about 12 and the second one when I was in my early 30s. So I experienced the new stepfamily from two different ages, so I pretty much sat on every seat on the bus, the stepfamily bus.

I assumed when I became a stepmom that I would just do things that worked for me in embracing a stepmom or didn't go well with my stepmom. My stepmom and my biological mother did not get along. Big friction between those two. And my dad was in the middle of that and so I watched him not really handle that well. It doesn't mean he didn't love us. There weren't a lot of books out about this back then. And I remember as a kid being in tremendous tension all the time. Every major event in my life, including my wedding, was shrouded in tension because of the stepfamily dynamic.

I was bound and determined I was not going to do that to my stepkids. So when they got married, again they were 11 and 13 when we got married.

Roger Marsh: Did you have a good relationship with them going into the marriage as good as it could be?

Laura Petherbridge: Yes, they lived with their mother, we saw them on weekends. So it was back when dads had visitation; it wasn't the 50/50 like you see today. And they lived about 25, 30 minutes away. So we would go to them, pick them up, take them to a movie, go have lunch, do stuff like that with them. And so it wasn't like they were underfoot like sometimes in the summer or whatever they'd come for the weekend or come for more.

But I discovered this is way harder than I thought it was going to be. I don't know what these kids want, I don't know what they need, they're being raised completely differently than I was raised. This was back when you got punished. Being raised by a single parent mom, she just looked at us and we stopped whatever behavior she didn't like. And so his kids weren't being raised like that. And so I was this overwhelming, "Wait a minute, that's not going to go on in my home."

But you see, they weren't my children. And so if Dad and Mom were going to choose to raise them that way, that was none of my business. And women hate hearing me say that. Oh my gosh, I get so much hate. But the reality is a step-parent cannot parent more than the parent. And if the parent is okay with it, the step-parent is just beating their heads against the wall if they don't.

So I had a lot of adjusting to do and I felt outside that circle. My husband and his kids have a circle. I'm the newcomer, and if I don't like the way they have formed their circle, I really do not have a lot of power to change that. So in especially the early years, there was a lot of grief, a lot of sorrow. I constantly was trying, "Lord, show me what these kids need, not what I need." A lot of sacrifice. Christmases were totally different. I mean, it was an incredible amount of change that I was not prepared for.

Roger Marsh: Well Laura Petherbridge, the time has gone by much too quickly and we're going to need to ask you to come back for another edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk to keep on talking about your great new book called Stepfamilies of the Bible: Timeless Wisdom for Blended Families. Laura, can you join us again next time?

Laura Petherbridge: I would be honored. Thanks for asking.

Roger Marsh: It's truly a gift when someone can take the hardest parts of their own story and turn them into help for other people, and that is exactly what Laura Petherbridge has done. You're listening to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh, and today we heard part one of my conversation with Laura Petherbridge about stepfamilies, blended families, and the wisdom Scripture offers to all of us. Her most recent book is called Stepfamilies of the Bible: Timeless Wisdom for Blended Families, and we've got a link to it along with today's full broadcast over at drjamesdobson.org. Again, that's jdfi.org if you'd like to take the shortcut to our main landing page.

Here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, we're committed to preserving and promoting the institution of the family and the biblical principles upon which it is based. Programs like the one you heard today are made possible by friends like you, and we invite you to partner with us with a gift of any amount in support of our ministry. You can donate securely online when you go to jdfi.org. You can also speak with a member of our constituent care team. That number is 877-732-6825.

I'm Roger Marsh, thanks so much for joining us today. On behalf of all of us here at Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, we appreciate your prayers and ongoing support. Be sure to tune in again next time when I'll welcome Laura Petherbridge once again for part two of her conversation about stepfamilies in the Bible. That's coming up on the next edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.