Category: Stepmother

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3 Things You Shouldn’t Say to a Stepmother

You don’t go through a divorce at 40 years old, the fearsome learning curve of online dating or the challenges of dating a dad whilst lacking a shred of maternal instinct without some bits that really sting.  Dividing up household belongings, furnishing an apartment with rental furniture that exudes all the cosy vibe of a supermarket coolroom and the hearbreak that is divvying up half of your elderly cat’s ashes (because shared cat custody in life extends to shared custody in the afterlife) are just some of the blows that land hard.

Like me, you will survive all of that, propped up in my case by plenty of sauv-blanc-fuelled couch time and rock-solid best friends. You’ll emerge eventually, with a new sense of resilience and potentially a new wardrobe, depending on how heavily you subscribed to the divorce diet.  After a while, your heart will move on from the listless malaise of heartbreak and the depressive impact wrought by consumption of white spirits, and open up to the concept of a new emerging relationship.

If you have wound your way through the ghosters, players and no-limit baggage-toters of later-in-life singledom, you may feel that the little stabby moments of heartbreak are behind you. However if you marry a Dad and set up camp in the suburbs with some fully-formed miniature humans, be prepared for some verbal barbs that feel like undiluted apple cider vinegar on an open vein.

They come in the form of things people say to a stepmother.

Google the combo of ‘say’ and ‘stepmother’ and the interwebs will present you exactly 9.6 octodecillion helpful tips about what a stepmother shouldn’t say. Camouflaged about 9.5 octodecillion records in are the almost-mute protests of a camp of stepmothers who politely try to offer up suggestions about what you should not say to THEM.

Here are a few.

‘You knew what you were getting into’

It’s worth getting this one out the way early – if there was nation-wide census of the phrase most often heard by any step-parent, regardless of gender, it’s this one. If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard this one I would have a dedicated shoe-room, my mid-life crisis second car (a Mustang GT, which is a nod to my ability to love a non-age-appropriate bogan vehicle which began in my owning a 70s Torana as my first ride) and a scratch golf handicap.

Despite the sheer number of stepmothers who are nodding at this, fortified as we so often are on a Sunday by a chilled beverage, if we were to band together and protest this statement in the streets with Canva-crafted placards, we’d be run out of town with the last of the climate change deniers.

Fact: we didn’t know what we were getting into.

There is no Stepmum-prep 101. A distinct lack of Netflix documentary material. If only there was a clan of wise elder Stepmothers that would whisper truths to you in Primary School in the same way you get ‘The Talk’ when you approach a certain age. But there isn’t. The term ‘Stepmommy blogger’ is not common parlance.  Even if every stepmother wrote online about every experience, our musings would be buried well beneath pinterest vision-boards featuring ideas for school lunches that are now apparently only palatable if served in bento boxes.

So we didn’t know.

‘You aren’t their mother’

 Well, throw on a cape and call yourself Captain Obvious.

I know I am not their mother. Everything about my unblemished womb, unresolved tendency to lapse into hyperventilation in the proximity of bulk baby supply stores and festering feelings of resentment at their being no concept of ‘pawternity leave’ is testament to my never having borne a child.

However in my years as a stepmother, I have been called upon to execute on a range of duties that are fair and square the domain of a mother. I have made cake for a bake sale – even if it involved decanting a supermarket loaf cake onto a paper plate and giving it a blatant bedazzling with the leftover sugar flowers from our wedding cake. I’ve done school pickup – pushing bravely through the fear that is contemplating dozens of identically-clad children without the innate ability to identify a child through a longstanding observance of their distinguishing traits. I’ve laundered countless garments and suffered the pilfering of my favourite sports socks once a tweenager’s feet approximated the size of my own. I’ve made countless meals that were scorned with all the vehement protests that biological mothers suffer.

I’m not their mother, nor do I need to be. I don’t need to share DNA to share the responsibility of preventing a child from running into traffic or ingesting poison.

So far, so good.

‘When are you having kids of your own?’

This is one that everyone in the sisterhood, not just the stepmotherhood, can get behind. There’ll be barely a woman that hasn’t been asked at some point when they are going to do their duty to the perpetuation of the human race by issuing some progeny. In the early years of my first married go-round, if I felt particularly ill-favoured towards the enquirer, a favoured response would be ‘It’s not in God’s plan’ with an appropriately downcast expression. Shuts it right down.

As the years go on, this question has fallen by the wayside. This is likely due to the fact that despite hefty investment in anti-ageing creams, its clearly becoming obvious that with the passage of time, my reproductive organs are likely to be in about as good nick as my 1975 Torana.

By definition, Stepmothers are hardy souls. We wouldn’t be navigating child support arrangements, shared-household logistics and the management of children that aren’t our own without a little resilience.

But spare us some of these questions.

If in doubt, there is one that’s always acceptable:

‘Would you like a glass of red or white with that?’

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Podcast Episode: Dating a Dad

My first podcast! I was delighted to have a chat to Sami Lukis about the crazy world of dating a dad – when you’ve never wanted kids of your own!

https://www.podcastoneaustralia.com.au/podcasts/romantically-challenged/dating-a-dad

About Sami and the Podcast:

Sami Lukis has established herself as one of Australia’s most accomplished and versatile media personalities, notching up a successful career spanning more than 20 years, as a Television Presenter, Radio Host, Author,  Podcaster, Journalist, Red Carpet Reporter, Professional MC, Columnist and Media Commentator.

In 2018, Sami published her first book “Romantically Challenged”  through Penguin Random House and she also launched the spin-off podcast “Romantically Challenged” on PodcastOne, which was nominated for Best Original Podcast at the 2019 Australian Commercial Radio Awards.


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The Rookie Stepmother’s Guide to Gaming

In the period somewhere beyond your stepchild’s read-and-write phase, and definitely prior to their leaving home, brace yourself for the onset of something even more pervasive than this child’s disdain for your cooking.

The world of gaming.

My experience of childhood gaming was gained at the joystick of a Hanimex game console. Right up there with the gut-wrenching deprivation associated with never having a clutch of legit Barbies was the ignominy of being deprived of the #1 console of the 1970s – the Atari. My request to Santa that year had clearly been light on specifics and instead of receiving the now-iconic console with its nearly-real woodgrain that contrasted stylishly with its hulking black cover, robust joystick and options managed by six schmicky switches, our household was gifted with its less-salubrious cousin, the Hanimex 1292.

We stifled our disappointment in this brand-name fail and then enthusiastically devoted countless hours to conquering rows of alien creatures from a single warlike token (crafted long before the term ‘avatar’ even existed), constrained as it was to only moving horizontally, with diminishing cover from eminently-penetrable blocks that served as barracks. Standard also with the console was the ‘Olympics’ which delivered further games that were variations on the theme of a geometric shape addressing a moving object.

However, you might be unsurprised to know that a misspent youth involving a 1978 Hanimex, toting its 32 colours and whopping 43 bytes of data memory is in no way adequate preparation for modern-era gaming.

Having embraced that learning curve, here’s what I found:

It’s how kids play together today

If your childhood, like mine, consisted of in-person social activities, where you’d cycle helmet-less a couple of streets over to a mates house to play make-believe games, you’d be staggered to find that today’s teen need not be in the same house or even the same continent to play together.

Instead they are all decked out in headsets that allow them to communicate with all the other player with all the swagger of the (first-generation, 1980s) Maverick in Top Gun. Despite the chasm of several decades, the focus on elaborate call signs, inexplicable lingo and the ability for escalation into shouty-ness seems uncannily common to both Top Gun and Fortnite.

In some ways, the social aspect is vaguely reassuring. It would appear that gaming is now not reserved for those geeky, loner kids you observed honing their first-person shooter skills in Doom, handwriting their manifesto in a jotter pad and, if they were in the US, lurching worryingly close to taking their skills into the classroom.

The expense

In today’s gaming universe, there is no concept of buying a console and expecting this to be a comprehensive package of everything that is required to keep a kid entertained. It’s like the next-level mismatch in expectations that came with your Barbie Treehouse if you didn’t read the fine-print that said *accessories not included.

If you would like your stepchild to be spared the status of social pariah, they will also need:

  • A PC with the level of grunt that only two years ago would have been sufficient to run a major financial institution’s data centre.
  • A mouse that cost more than your favourite pair of wedges
  • A gaming keyboard that you can be assured will NEVER feature in the back-to-school specials at Officeworks.

And this my friends, is only the hardware.

In-game purchases are required to keep a child’s head above the competitive-gaming water. Beyond the almost-logical idea of purchasing useful weapons and tools rather than having to fight other children for them in the actual game is the inexplicable concept of paying money for clothing for your avatar. Clothing. Full outfits. Accessories.

While I’m all about the joy of augmenting your wardrobe via online purchases, I feel like an essential element of this experience is the arrival of a package, containing something that you can actually wear in real-life. If the purchase had taken place under the influence of a few too many sauvignon blancs on a Friday night, there’s the added element of surprise.

If I was inclined to tote up these things, I’d be certain that our household’s expenditure on gaming-related paraphernalia in the last two years is on par with the investment in my first car. Admittedly, the purchase of a 1975 Torana in the late 80s is probably modest by today’s standards, but if that brown-and-beige beast were still around today it would fetch a tidy price amongst the Holden aficionados. By contrast, our last two X-Boxes serve no apparent purpose other than their annual role as props for the one wonky leg of the Christmas tree.

Investment of time

I know that it’s easy to lose yourself in the world of gaming. Even the modest functionality offered by the 1970s Hanimex was a time-suck. The makers of the first generation Donkey Kong underestimated the attention span of a child, providing a scoreboard with one less digit than was necessary to thwart the user’s relentless quest to ‘clock’ the game – so we all just kept going.

Current gaming goes way beyond this. Infinite numbers of levels within a game. The ability to simply offer a new version digitally, with a dizzying array of new features, without the need for anyone to schlepp into the local games shop and buy a new version.  Today’s gaming creators would scoff at rookie tactics like the lights and sounds of pokies and clock-free / window-less casinos as temptation to lose hours of your time (and possibly custody of your children if you left them in the car in the casino car park.) They’ve discovered artful ways to target the neural centres of the brain that govern reward systems and ways to fiddle with your dopamine.

All this means your stepchild is not going to want to leave their extortionately-priced gaming chair anytime soon.  If your household is prone to the somewhat elastic boundaries that are a common feature of the Disney Dad, the general philosophy of ‘what’s the harm?’ may prevail. The upside of this is that you are free to see a movie, indulge at the day spa or get through an entire paperback without the guilt of dodging real-life, outdoorsy kid activities that if you are in the earnest early years of stepmother-hood you might feel otherwise compelled to join.  

The upside

Today’s games do apparently contribute some benefits. There is clear link to the development of hand-eye co-ordination, visual-spatial ability and reaction time. When, in an attempt at relevance, I tried to dabble in Fortnite, I quickly discovered these traits distinctly lacking, to the extent that I managed to architect my own demise, not at the hands of one of my 99 armed foes, but by falling off a building. It’s unclear whether this is the result of inadequate stimulation in my youth at the hands of our simplistic Hanimex or a more recent gradual erosion of brain cells due to a long love affair with a chilled glass of white wine.

So your stepchild will acquire some life skills, whether they are the fine motor skills that may signal success as a surgeon or the ability to accumulate power, wealth and weapons in preparation for the role of dictator of a small country.

On the other hand, if you want to stimulate some old-school 1970s resilience, try presenting them with last-year’s console that you got for free on e-Bay and see how long it takes before there are tears. 

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Four Things To Ask When You’re Dating A Dad

If this is not your first go round on the singles-scene rodeo, you might find that you have snuck into an entirely new dating demographic. It’s one where a tiny checkbox on a website is going to redirect your dating destiny if you give it a click. The one which sends out a flare out that you are ok with accepting a partner with kids.

Click consciously.

If you’ve found yourself childless and single somewhere north of your thirties, you’re statistically unlikely to find someone else with the same status. Being ok with someone with a tot or two in tow means that you don’t risk ruling out some perfectly well-adjusted bachelors who just happen to not have found forever with their baby mama. You will open up a pool of single men who once cared for a woman so much that they co-mingled some genes and created another small human.

If you are headed down this path, there are some key questions that demand asking. The kind of questions that might ordinarily seem like early-relationship suicide, but if asked and answered give you a whole lot of direction about where things might be headed.

How would you describe your relationship with your child’s mother?

Talking about exes in your early dating days is a red flag. A glowing, lava-like, blistering-inferno-coloured flag. On one hand, discussing exes is just asking to unearth the decomposing stench of a relationship that has festered and died. On the other hand you might simply expose a relationship that has suffered the same fate as an accidentally neglected indoor house plant, that with a shortage of sunlight and water, has simply failed to thrive.

There’s one reason to address this elephant in the room. If you and the dad make it then you need to have the lowdown on this lady as she’s legit going to be an ongoing part of your life.  The baby mama could be anything from your long-lost soul sister who you’d willing share tequila shots and Netflix binges right through to someone who will paint you as the most evil stepmother this side of Disney.

Best to know where she falls on that spectrum.

Do you want more kids?

By definition a dad’s done this parenting thing. He either loves being a parent with every molecule of his being or he’s come up a bit gun-shy after the experience. It’s not a first-date question, but one to casually canvass once you aren’t too far in. Regardless of whether your ovaries are screeching for offspring or are cowering in fear somewhere behind your pancreas, you need this answer. The beauty of it is that he has a realistic, full-bodily-fluids, unromantic view of what childbirth and child-rearing entails and if he’s up for that again, then you have a serious dad on your hands. He gets it.

If you are a bit meh when it comes to kids, and he’s not up for another go-round, then you have the perfect union – something likely to be punctuated with the conveniently scheduled insertion of offspring in your life, with known, planned, kid-free periods.

What do you expect from me?

This is a question for the advanced players on the dad-dating spectrum. The answer is often to be found in the detail of the custody arrangements. If this is the standard every-other-weekend paternal arrangement then you can look forward to fortnightly freedom – date nights, Sunday sleep-ins and control of the TV remote. If you have weak and intermittent maternal urges, this is everything you could ever want. An excuse to stock the fridge, guilt-free, with chicken nuggets and cookies’n’cream ice cream. A living, breathing reason to go to amusement parks, sink your choppers into a toffee apple and buy oversized popcorn.

If the baby-mama is not in a place, chemically or mentally, that permits responsible parenting, you might find there’s a lot less of the theme park and a lot more of school lunches and the relentless focus on laundry and balanced meals. Still, this might mean you’ve snared a maternal-esque experience without the inconvenience of childbirth and stretchmarks.

How often do you see your children?

This one is a minefield.

If your date never sees their kids, there’s a potential red flag:

  • They’ve potentially created small humans that they no longer wish to deal with, which, if you have a single caring bone in your body, you’ll probably find staggering. You’d also want to pause for a moment if you are mentally fast-forwarding to a place where the two of you are committed and potentially considering kids of your own. Even if your dating radar never searches that far ahead, a guy who can bail out on his actual children wouldn’t hesitate to ghost you, in a heartbeat.
  • They may have some fairly fundamental character-flaws or seriously poor life choices that have failed to stand up to the scrutiny of the Family Law enforcers. A dad has to have some pretty serious issues to be denied custody of his children and if he has those kinds of issues, you probably want to give him a miss.

Alternately, there could be a really sad story here.  A story of a manipulative, narcissistic ex who has managed to create a work of fiction that has the authorities fooled and has blocked access to the kids. These women are out there. Behind every one of those is a dad yearning to be a dad, but being denied the opportunity.

Best to find out where he fits on this continuum.

Being open to dating a Dad opens your world to men that have the propensity for unconditional love. The good ones will entertain your tough questions. Ask them.

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What A Rookie Stepmother Can Learn From Maria Von Trapp

If you are inclined to take on life lessons from movies, you’ve learned all the key traits of a governess from Mary Poppins, the innate elegance of a little black dress from Breakfast at Tiffanys, and all the moves you ever needed from Dirty Dancing.

One of the most enduring movies about stepmothers of the non-wicked genre is The Sound of Music – where we are enticed to adore a pious yet lovable curtain-trasher.

Here’s what we learned from this classic.

Your life’s purpose can be subject to random revision

One would assume that there would be a fairly deep level of soul searching involved in the decision to dedicate a life to poverty, celibacy, charity and the wearing of unattractive shoes. Whether triggered by a major life event or driven by deep-seated faith, ticking the ‘nun’ box after consultation with your high school career counselor has taken some thought.

With the childlessness that is an obvious extension of this whole celibacy gig, its fair to say that launching yourself into step-parenthood after a mere dabble in some childminding work experience outside the abbey is a variation on what fate intended.

Don’t underestimate the value of a showtune

Maria won over the Von Trapp children by recognising the areas where the brood were bereft of love, where they lacked a recognition of the joys of art and culture. Given the handy availability of a guitar, Maria chose to convey both love and life lessons in song. We won’t all feel like our life’s purpose has been fulfilled by bestowing children with the ability to string together a do-re-mi. We won’t all feel compelled to help small humans understand simple joys via a melodious exploration of brown paper packages tied up with string.

The modern day childless stepmother equivalent is karaoke. In the same way Maria made a simple yet multi lingual ‘good night’ wonderfully lyrical, you can embed within a child everything from a serious understanding of deep south sentiment via ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ through to how a simple dancefloor hedonism can co-exist with chart-topping success via ‘Dancing Queen’

These are all valuable learnings.

Re-worked soft furnishings might need a re-do

There are degrees in the spectrum of adequately clothing children.

As a child of financially circumspect parents, clothes that were handed down from close relatives or family were embraced with almost the same degree of enthusiasm as a puppy. If you had a single pair of jeans that needed to stay with you while your growth spurt converted them from full length jeans to a ¾ length pant, you’d be well pleased to inherit jeans from a slightly taller relative.

For the Von Trapp kiddies, presented as they were in his’n’hers outfits that were a special kind of sailor with a large dose of daggy, they were more than content to go next level with outfits constructed from handy and expendable curtain fabric.

Today’s redo? Its going to take way more than recycled window furnishings to win over a stepkid. Cash up your Visa sister, this is a war to be won at Westfield.

There will be a battle against an incumbent

Whether previously childless or not, the path to step-parenting is varied. Whether you have employed some Disney-stepmother-like plotting to dislodge a biological mother or you simply step into the void left by death, divorce or despair, it’s a personal journey. By definition, there is an incumbent of some flavour.

Maria had two.

Firstly – a biological mother who had the fortitude to withstand the rigours of birthing seven children but somewhat recklessly succumbed to scarlet fever. This is possibly the most insurmountable type of incumbent. No matter the state of the relationship or deep-seated character flaws of the biological mother, an untimely death means that they will assume the status of a combination of Mother Teresa and Princess Diana. The only upside of marrying a widower is that you are spared a living-breathing-child-support-absorbing human who will remain a fixture in your stratosphere.

Secondly – a glamorous baroness with a current role in the widower’s life. Granted most of us will not battle a Princess Grace lookalike but there are many modern day equivalents that would be fairly daunting. You might be battling the rebound relationship he had with a gym junkie with an obsession for competing in on-stage bikini figure competitions. Perhaps a  Gwyneth style earth-mother who seems born to assume parenting duties for stepchildren, with abundant spare time funded by a website hawking popular yet unproven herbal remedies. An Angelina Jolie type who has some spare positions in her rainbow family.

No matter what, there’ll be a third party of some kind.

There may be external challenges

Poor Maria. If it wasn’t enough for her to ditch her vow to a capital-S Sisterhood, convert the affections of seven children through song and stave off both a deceased and living female opponent, her desire for ongoing happiness is further threatened by the spectre of the Third Reich. Thankfully her nun-buddies play a part in sheltering the children before they all make a break across the mountains for neutral-as-ever Switzerland.

If you’ve battled with a biological mother,  a deep-seated internal ambivalence to parenthood and a full on tribe of bonus kids with needs you can never anticipate, you hardly need the brute force of a new world order to make this whole gig harder.

Just bear in mind that, unlike Maria, you are not dodging militants pushing guns, gas chambers and genocide. It’s the local PTA that restricts mother’s day stall gift-giving to purely the blood-mothers that will do you in.

Thankfully though, we know that Maria makes it over domestic, metaphorical and actual mountains to safety and a happily ever after. If unsure, google the real -life story and you’ll find that the ending was even easier – the family left openly, safely and unimpeded by Gestapo, with no assistance from any member of any Nun-derground railway, via train to Italy.

This gig could be easier than you thought.

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The Rookie Stepmother – How Schools Work


Assuming you haven’t come into step parenting at a very young age, you are going to find there are vast differences in the way that schools work compared to your own tender experience as a child. If you are inserted into step parenthood via a child that is already some way into their school years, you’ll find the learning curve staggering. Here is the rookie’s guide to navigating the minefield that is primary school.


Everything is on an app

Without wanting to reveal my age, I have to declare that school communications to my parents involved photocopies of something typed in the font that we know today as courier, which was in fact the only font that you could belt out on an old-school manual typewriter. Mrs Bryan in the principal’s office constructed all the notices which were duly carted home, often adhered to a loose cheese sandwich which had been scorned during the lunch break.  This is how you knew of Father’s Day Stalls and how you received excursion consent forms (without nearly enough fine print as today’s litigious world would demand)

Now it’s an app. This is goodness in that you are aren’t subjected to the inherent inadequacy of single-copy paper-based comms where your child switches between two households. You need not delve a hand into a school bag, risking the shock that comes from sliding a hand over a long-ignored pear that has started to reduce itself to liquid. The downside? This app is the ‘Facebook of Shame’ in that it will convey to you every extra-curricular activity that you are failing to support and every thankless volunteer activity that you are leaving to that tired but dedicated group of super mums who care more than you. It has a Facebook like feed function, but denies you a like button so you can’t relieve your stepmum guilt by simply showing thumbs up support about something to do with the next trivia night. 

The canteen is different

Ordering a bought lunch was a rare treat in my primary school years. The canteen menu was free of any guilt-inducing count of calories, fat grams or healthy food star ratings. It contained a glorious array of junk food and you were at no risk of censure or removal into child services protection if you ordered the combo of sausage roll, pineapple donut AND chocolate milk.

Entrée into this olden-day world of lunch orders demanded nothing more from an overworked mother than the order written on a paper bag and inclusion of the appropriate collection of coins.

These days, again, it’s on an app. Pies and donuts don’t feature on the list. Losing a first tooth in a sausage roll half way through primary school is apparently a milestone that will be denied our current generation. The equivalent will be a tooth gouged out by a canteen-baked, guaranteed nut-free, organic oat cookie. Soft drinks are replaced by fruit tinged bubbly water and smoothies. It feels inevitable that the app will shortly include a tab that presents you with purely paleo options.

The order is charged to your credit card and there’s a neat little ‘recurring’ button if you want an intervention-free delivery of a standing lunch order, assuming your stepchild is conveniently lodged in a food rut. Just remember to turn it off once they graduate.

Traditions are reworked

Mother’s and Father’s Days are universally a big topic for kids schools. Twenty years ago this involved some concentrated craft effort in producing picture frames, hand-made chocolates and glittery cards. Now it involves a serious supply chain logistics effort in diverting cheap Chinese made products of dubious quality to local school kids.

The school app has educated me that the female champions that require honouring on mother’s day are confined to very traditional roles:  ‘Bring your mum, your nanna, your grandma!’  (stepmamas don’t get a guernsey)

Sadly, it appears that getting a male role model into a father’s day breakfast is much harder and achieving a respectable level of attendance necessitates casting a far wider net. The school app will breezily convey that it the ‘Father’s and Special Fellas’ day stall and invites ‘Dads, Grandpas, Stepdads, Uncles, Neighbours, Friends and Brothers’ and only just stops short of inviting your local Jim’s mowing guy.

Digital delivery of guilt

Social media already provides several channels to provoke feelings of complete inadequacy. There is already an amazing ability to poke at your most vulnerable bits. The sparkling blue seas around a Facebook Bora Bora honeymoon overwater bungalow pic will gouge away at that item on your un-ticked bucket list.  The Pinterest post of a pantry impeccably herded into stacked and labelled Tupperware will compare unfavourably with your food anarchy that plays host to an infestation of pantry moths and make you question everything about your ability as an organised woman.

The school app is going to grind away at your guilt levels in the same way that seawater carves out cliffs. Here are some examples

  • A call for volunteers in the kid’s canteen. A desperate call for volunteers in the kid’s canteen. A sombre announcement that the kid’s canteen is closing. The auctioning off of bulk ingredients left unused after the closure of the kid’s canteen
  • The call to send a dollar with your kid for icy pole day, noted  by you three days after icypole day
  • The call for helpers on gelato day, asking that you BYO and apron and scoop which only serves to reinforce your domestic disgrace in owning neither an apron nor an ice-cream scoop. 

A twist on fundraising concepts

There’s a wine drive.

We had a snowball drive in my day. Thousands of marshmallows gave up their lives to coalesce with faux chocolate and desiccated coconut and evolve into a mountain of half-dozen snowball packs. You had to sell them to neighbours, colleagues and family to raise money to fund school projects.

When I saw ‘wine drive’ I applauded the evolution of the snowball drive. I imagined a carefully curated collection of award-winning whites and reds, pre-bundled for you and representing the perfect emergency stash for unexpected guests. The backup/disaster recovery equivalent that will save you calling an Uber in the event of a late night wine drought. The perfect combination of a fund-raising package that benefits the school and boosts your wine stash. I’d pay over the odds for that.

No. They are actually calling on you to donate your unwanted wine to be auctioned off at trivia night.

They lost me at unwanted wine.

The upshot?

You just need to become accustomed to how your life has changed. Five years ago you would have woken up to a bunch of email notifications triggered by a late-night wine-fuelled placement of your profile on a dating website. Today you will wake up to a notification that there’s a kid to be picked up after school camp at 2:15pm.

It’s different. Try to breathe.

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Managing Blended Family Finances (ie hands off my shoe budget!)

Dollar Sign isolated on white background. 3D render

If food fights and first sleepovers weren’t enough, the freight train of stepmother firsts is about to bring a new flavour of normal your way.

Finances.

Specifically, shared finances. Melded finances started off simple back in the day where all you were trying to do was merge funds as a kid-free couple in your early 20s. This era probably felt very straightforward if you had refrained from diving into a mortgage or cultivating a care factor over retirement funds.

Fast forward a bunch of years and if you’ve still maintained a budget that is not impeded by the need to keep any small humans alive, you’ve probably become nicely settled into being the queen of your financial domain. If you want to pay half the GDP of a small nation to spend some quality time at a silent yoga retreat to eat and sleep like a peasant and refrain from all verbal interactions then there’s no one around to judge you.

If you shack up with a stepdad, you are buying into a complex financial world – one where all the might of the family law court, the child support agency and the tax office are king. Get used to it, the elephant in the room that is the child support calculation and it’s minions that manage the collection of school fees, books and uniforms are going to be putting their grubby feet on your furniture for as many years as it takes to marry this guy’s kids off.

Even if you get a handle on what these grabby chaps are going to shave off your shoe budget, there’s a bunch of sneaky little overheads inherent in managing a family of kidlets. Like food. Like clothing.

To top it all off, if there’s child support involved, and there almost always is unless the ex is no longer of this world, or is in jail, then you are going to watch dollars that ordinarily would have greased the wheels of your household head over to hers. Repeatedly. 

These financial shenanigans are going to surround you for a while, so you need to understand this whole get-up and have a strategy to deal. Here’s some advice.

Kids are expensive

If you are a parent already, you know all this, so skip to the next section so you can preserve some energy to dwell darkly on how child support is spent. If not, read on and know this:

Food. Kids prefer highly processed foods. This means you are not just paying for whatever original food item may have existed in the general area of a fruit roll-up, but all the rolling, extracting and packaging equipment that has been involved since, not to mention the R&D spend on genetic modification that may be secreted deeply in its past. A simple plate of pear quadrants whilst cheaper and more recognisable to Mother Nature, is excruciatingly unpalatable to a 4-year-old.

Clothes. Kids relentlessly grow out of their wardrobes and are immune to any conversation about buying cheap versions based on the solid formula of cost-per-wear that you’ve personally used to justify ‘classic’ and ‘vintage’ purchases for about the last twenty years. Those swooshy Nikes are going to be on that kid for about seven outings, but don’t even suggest that they be clad in Dunlop Volleys till their feet stop growing. If they don’t grow out of them, they’ll lose them. Losing elements of a school uniform is a special kid art form. I’ve developed a dark conspiracy that the lost property office at a primary school is a complete myth and, under cover of darkness, they secretly launder (literally and figuratively) items back into the local suburban uniform store where you’ll buy them again to replace the lost item.

If they are not lost at school they’ll be lost in that Bermuda Triangle that always exists between split parent households where neither party’s willingness to admit culpability means the most Mexican of standoffs will result when it comes to replacement.

Don’t think about how the child support is being spent

Watching child support dollars flow like unstoppable lava into another household is relentlessly disconcerting, and something you’ll be ill-prepared for unless you’ve had the experience of investing in 1980s timeshare holidays or early 2000s agribusiness.

My friends, in this case, you need to make like Elsa and just let it go.

Do not try to determine what child support is intended to cover, in an effort to see if it absolves your household income from items such as school fees or uniforms. You will lose what remains of your Netflix-binge-ravaged eyesight if you try to find guidelines on this topic on any government website.

Do not internally or overtly make any observation on how your household’s contribution to the child’s mother appears to be funding her expensive high maintenance balayage hair colour, intricate tattoo collection or new boyfriend’s desire to make his garage band the next Nirvana. Nothing good can come of you comparing your now-budget summer holiday in a wonky floored, grease-and-despair scented cabin in a caravan park awash with grubby 10 year olds to her newly subsidised trips to Hawaii complete with infinity pool and kids club. For every mother who seems to be rorting the child support system there are ten others that need every last dollar that your household is providing.

Just let the funds go forth with good grace (and the knowledge that child support law makes it non-negotiable anyway) and know that one day this too will pass.

Maybe help get the kid a job at Maccas so that day that it passes might come sooner.

An option – contribute nothing except your own share.

This would appear to be a perfectly valid strategy for several reasons. Let’s start with the obvious –  this crazy little village had its own functioning financial eco-system before you existed and it survived just fine.  It was feeding, housing and clothing itself as either a single unit or a split household well before you came on the scene. Through some terrified 3am research in one of those early dad-dating days I established that (at least in my jurisdiction) the child support overlords don’t look at the new chick on the block as a contributor either.

It does get a tiny bit tough though if you are spreadsheeting within an inch of your life just to prove that your contribution is entirely fair based on your personal consumption of utilities, fridge space and internet data. If this means that your partner’s income dissipates to a level that leaves him drinking instant coffee and taking homebrand ramen to work for lunch while you drink $60 bottles of rose and engage a personal Pilates instructor then you might have missed the whole point of a true domestic partnership.

You might want to strike a balance where you’ll possibly contribute more to the household than you would if no children existed in it, but allows for greater human dignity and equality (and perhaps a greater likelihood that occasions might be marked by little sparkly trinkets from your partner from time to time)

Above all? Its only money. This whole shindig is likely to cost you less than the single-girl-sauvignon blanc savaging of your liver that was the status quo before you dated a dad.

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Tips for the First Stepfamily Vacay

If you’ve taken the gradual approach to offspring introductions and are party to the regulation alternate weekend structure of step-parenting, you may not have experienced the very special kind of immersion that is the school holidays.

As a non-maternal type, you will have rigorously avoided holidaying in school term breaks – smugly dodging inflated air fares and shuddering outwardly at the concept of theme parks overrun with children recklessly toting multi-coloured ice-creams near your white linen pants.  Inevitably, you WILL holiday as a newly blended family, high-season tariffs be-damned. This relentless period of consecutive exposure to a new stepchild will be a learning experience on both sides. Here’s a guide to planning for this momentous event.

Carefully select the venue

Your holiday venue selection criteria to date may have involved:

  • High expectations regarding the thread count of bedroom linen
  • A need to be walking distance to a local restaurant or within the range of Uber eats so that your afternoon drinks aren’t dampened by needing to pilot a vehicle to get fed
  • An in-house day spa
  • Proximity to wineries

None of these apply to the first accompanied-by-stepchild holiday.

The single most important factor? Activities. Lots of them. For avoidance of doubt, this does not mean guided wine flights, cheese tasting tours or the 3-hour spa indulgence package. It means distinctly different things like trampolines, an outdoor pool awash with like-minded ten year olds, a games room and proximity to any joint that serves nachos.

On holidays, kids expect a ridiculous amount of entertainment. During school terms, they know how their day pans out  – wake up, protest about having a shower, do six hours or seven hours of school, eat everything in sight, reject dinner, protest about bedtime and sleep. On holidays, a new timetable applies and it needs to be filled, and it needs to be understood. 

An actual conversation on my first step-vacay:

“after breakfast, after we go to the beach, then you get your coffee, then we ride the bikes, then we have lunch, then we go to the pool THEN WHAT WILL WE DO???”

Be aware that if you answer that question with a proposed activity, you are bound by it. If you fail to deliver on that, you are guaranteed to hear this

“BUT YOU SAID!?”

Ensure you pick a venue that is a veritable Disneyland of extracurricular activities unless you want to be subjected to a lot of a whining and even more Monopoly.

Pack wine

You will likely already know that a certain amount of wine creates a very lovely temporary shroud that will protect you all from all kinds of reality in the form of heartbreak, work stress and the guilt of a carb binge. Mothers know, that once past that pesky period involving breastfeeding, wine will also take the edge off dealing with toddler tantrums, primary school dramas, endless laundry and hair washing battles.

Your first step-holiday might sound like the perfect opportunity to abstain from drinking, to insert a bonus detox event into your calendar given that you should probably stay upright and alert whilst partially responsible for a dependent human.

No. Wrong.

Firstly, this is not your child. If someone needs to retain their ability to drive a child to an emergency room following a cycling accident, it certainly need not be you.

Secondly, you are going to need SOMETHING grown-up to look forward to after a relentless day of child-centred activity.

Be prepared for the intensity

Family holidays are intense. As pre-work, binge-watch all variations of the Griswold movies. Then try to imagine them without humour.

Be reminded that this involves MULTIPLE consecutive days of unfolding stepchild experiences with the added spice of

  • No intermission. You are three hours from home. You can’t take a day off part way through the event. The best you can do is head out to ‘get a coffee and the newspaper’ and try to stretch that to an hour. 
  • No personal space. If you make the rookie mistake of re-creating what you loved when you were a kid and booked a cabin in a family caravan park, you are going to be confined to an area smaller than a shoebox and filled with cheap furnishings.  You will be huddling around a 32 inch LED TV. You will not be able to sneak in a nana nap mid afternoon while some kind of robust father-son wrestling and screaming ensues on the other side of a wafer-thin wall. Although I’m going to now avidly lobby for its universal acceptance, it is currently unheard of to book an extra cabin across the other side of the park to allow you to read crime novels in peace accompanied by home-made espresso martinis.

Control the duration

As a new couple, luxuriously lengthy breaks in amazing locations will always adhere to the principle that more time is better than less.

For your first step-holiday, try to consider the way in which children start kindergarten. Gradually. They go for a couple of hours each day. They do a day here and there. Only after a carefully planned time do they try to string together five consecutive days. It’s very gradual. In the holiday scenario, its you that needs to be ever-so-slowly immersed.

Don’t lock yourself into a ten day break, regardless of your previous principle that amortising the airfare over a longer holiday duration makes everything more economical.

My empirical research suggests this:

  • If you are in a location that has a long documented history of excellent weather and a procession of theme parks use the formula of number of theme parks plus one day.
  • If there is any chance of rain, a three night maximum is best.

An even more-evolved strategy, which I feel I should almost stamp with a personal patent, is the blended holiday. The blended family holidays together for the first portion of the break, with you returning to work at the halfway point. Nearly genius, this allows some father-child bonding time and an opportunity for you to return to your couch and your cat. Not recommended for the first holiday, this an advanced strategy to be implemented when you are three or four years in.

This is about planning,  people. Fail to plan, plan to fail.