During the month of October, The Real Wife Movement™ will be featuring stories from wives who have blended families. They will share what they did to ensure their families thrived beyond 10 years.

Be inspired by Tracie’s Story.

Donnell and I met in 2005 and we married in 2006. (Yes we dated only a year before we got married.) When I met my husband, he was a single father of two young children and I was a single mother of one son.

When people find out we are a blended family, they wanted to know how we made it work. They asked questions such as: Did you let him discipline your child and vice versa?

I want to share our story to encourage you:

When Donnell asked me to marry him, one of the things we did was what we called a pre-family meeting with our children. We wanted to create an avenue where they could be open and honest with us from the beginning.

Now don’t get me wrong, we had our challenges with all three of our children, however we let them know up front that they would be treated the same, to include discipline. We agreed they were all our children.  We let them know when someone asked us how many children we had, we would proudly say we have 3 children; (2) Boys and (1) Girl.

My husband and I both came from blended families and it was obvious who the step-kids were and who the biological kids were: we were made to feel that way.

Because of this, we agreed to allow our children to make the decision about how they wanted to address us. We never pressured them to call us mom or dad and we made it very clear they had already had a mom and dad. Our role would be that of an assistant, alongside  their parents. We never liked the words “step kids” or “step parents”. To us, it indicated they were the outsider and no one wants to feel like an outsider, right?

Donnell and I decided that even though we were blending our family, we would be a family with “No Steps.”