FROM THE EDITOR

It’s a messy business. When it comes to co-parenting someone else’s child, there’s no rule book. Every stepfamily comes with conditions, plus the further extended family that comes with any new relationship, which constitutes a volatile number of moveable human parts. Divided loyalties, unspoken alliances, complicated histories, broken relationships, almost certainly heartbreak, and probably a sense of betrayal, loss or failure will be at play on one side, if not both.

What could possibly go wrong?! Why on Earth would anyone venture into such an emotional minefield? Well, because love. And there’s always hope that things will work out smoothly. And sometimes it does, as we show in our cover story. And sometimes it doesn’t, as per our anonymous example who decided to move back to her own house after 10 months of trying to make her stepfamily work under one roof. And, that couple is still together.

A friend of mine has just broken up with her partner of 10 years. He had three kids to his ex-wife, who really didn’t like (hated) my (much younger) friend. This meant that every time they picked up the kids, or the ex came to pick up her kids, the atmosphere was anxious, and any exchange was terse. As friends, we wondered how she would mother these three kids who weren’t hers, and whether she would ever want children of her own – and if so, would he? Their considerable age gap made this a decidedly uncomfortable question, so we simply didn’t ask. She’s an adult, after all. So we went with it, and so did she, and it worked (kind of), until it didn’t. Page 6.