My new book (number 16!), Yours Mine Ours, is about a blended family. The term slips off the tongue so easily. To blend sounds like something that is seamlessly achieved, but as anyone who has experience of a blended family knows, this is never the case.
With divorce, separation and single parent families on the rise, I wanted to explore the real and raw realities of making two families one.
A question that has always fascinated me is – Do parents get to fall in love when that love means forcing their children into a new blended family? Why do your children have to upend their lives because you have fallen in love? What happens if they hate your new partner? What happens if you can’t stand your new partner’s kids?
Can love really conquer all?
Apparently not. Statistics show that over 70% relationships fail when the couples bring children from previous relationships into it. It’s not hard to see why.
I have friends who are step-parents and while they genuinely love their stepchildren they have not found it easy to combine parenting their biological children and their stepchildren, especially if they are close in age.
It’s hard enough trying to discipline, guide, protect, encourage and be there for your own children but imagine trying to do all that for a child who resents your very existence.
Most children do, certainly initially, resent step-parents as they see them as either the cause of their parent’s break up or they think they are trying to replace their own mother or father.
Step parenting particularly if, like in the book, the children are teenagers, requires patience, resilience an open-heart and a lot of tongue biting. We all parent differently, so how do we find a common parenting ground?
In Yours Mine Ours, James and Anna are madly in love, but is it enough? If their children are deeply unhappy with the new blended family arrangement, can they justify forcing them to continue living together. Is it selfish of them to put their love affair before their children’s happiness?
Will things improve over time, or will their children eventually cause a huge rift in their relationship that will destroy it forever.
In Yours Mine Ours, I wanted to explore the real, raw realities of making two families one.
As adults we wouldn’t dream of moving in with complete strangers and sharing everything with them – bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, holidays, finances, love, rules, curfews…the list is endless. And yet, we expect our children to do it. Is this fair?
Can Anna and James’ love for each other compensate for their children’s deep unhappiness or will they have to choose to let each other go?
Little did I know when I was writing the book that the world would turn upside down and war would break out in the Ukraine. I had no idea then that I would end up teaching English to Ukrainian refugees fleeing a war that came upon them overnight. Little did I think that I’d be staring at broken families every Friday and looking into the faces of bereft women (and a few young men) as they try to carve out a life far from home.
Just to be clear, I’m not a qualified English teacher, I’m just helping out. I give Kseniya the, gorgeous and very dedicated, Ukrainian English teacher a break on Fridays and come in to teach the last hour of class.
The Ukrainians in my class are resilient, inspiring, strong and joyful. We have so much fun every Friday. I am awed that despite the horror of their situation, these wonderful women and young men can smile and laugh. They are determined to make the most of a terrible situation.
Their stories are mostly the same – Worry about their husbands’ safety, praying the war will end soon, having to leave because they had to prioritise their children’s safety. They are concerned for their parents who refused to leave, their family members who stayed behind and they are being ground down by the constant gnawing worry that the war will drag on.
These wonderful people are incredibly resilient but they are heart-sore and devastated to be apart from their loved ones. Broken families come in all forms.
It is a privilege to spend time with these courageous and inspiring people. We can only hope and pray that the war does not drag on and that they get to go home, hug their loved ones and mend their broken families once more.
(c) Sinéad Moriarty
About Yours Mine Ours:
What’s another branch on the family tree?
Things are finally looking up for Anna. Seventeen miserable years of marriage to man-child Connor have left her drained and ready for a new start. So when they separate, she couldn’t be more thrilled to move in with James, a handsome lecturer who is everything her ex-husband is not: kind, thoughtful, and above all, reliable.
But Anna and James’s kids hate living with the loved-up couple and the new set-up. Their teenage daughters – one a studious high achiever and the other a cool rich girl unbothered by grades or exams – have nothing in common. And Anna’s wild football-mad nine-year-old son declares war on bookish James.
Nobody said step-parenting was easy; Anna and James are about to find out exactly how complicated it can be. With exes, new partners-of-exes and money all in the mix, home life is fast becoming a minefield and their new-found happiness hangs in the balance. Do they have what it takes to make their blended family work?
‘Yours, Mine, Ours is her best to date . . . a hopeful book, full of love’ MARIAN KEYES
‘A story filled with heart and wit. It’s impossible not to root for the characters’ RACHAEL ENGLISH
‘Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant . . . I was on the edge of my seat to know whether it would all work out in the end . . . Sinéad is a true national treasure’ CLAUDIA CARROLL
Order your copy online here.
