Dear April,
I am getting married for the first time to a man who’s already had one wedding and three kids. I have one son who is eleven. The wedding is going to be small (under 50 guests) and set to a rustic wooded scene at my family’s home. The one catch is I’m having a hard time with my future husband’s choice of best man – his 16 yr old autistic son, who is prone to public and embarrassing meltdowns. I don’t want to be insensitive, but his son has not shown the support of our relationship or maturity to hold the role of best man in my opinion. I feel that his son is using the position as a way to manipulate his father. The son has screamed that we shouldn’t get married and told his father he would never be his best man and threatened to run away. All of a sudden he has changed his mind and told his dad he is ready to be a man and looks at it as some sort of initiation to manhood.
I’m afraid this is a reward for bad behavior for all the negative feelings made well known. Also, frankly, I don’t want someone that doesn’t support and love my future husband unconditionally standing at the front to witness our union. As a first time bride how should I address this? I don’t care if the flowers aren’t perfect, but those that stand by the side of my husband and I matter a great deal.
Signed,
Bride of a Blended Family
Dear Bride of a Blended Family,
First of all blending families is tough, and planning a wedding with a blended family is very tough. What you think is reasonable becomes moot. It’s very easy to compare your son with his kids, but the reality is that teenagers are very different than 11 year olds or adults. They don’t act reasonable on a good day, let alone a bad day — and then you’ve got the autism spectrum tossed in. So, while you feel his 16 year old son hasn’t been supportive of your marriage, understand that that is normal. From the kids’ points of view there’s all kinds of betrayals going on here because their father is marrying someone who isn’t their mother and is going to co-parent a new sibling (your son), which creates sibling rivalry in a new way. I know that you probably haven’t seen it that way, but if you look at it from the kid’s’ points of view, you might have some insight into their disappointment that their father is remarrying. This has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the fact that their parents divorced. In other words, this type of behavior comes with the territory. I know you want your husband’s best man to be unconditionally supportive, but that’s asking too much of a teenager who’s parents divorced. It’s the parent’s job to be unconditionally supportive — not the child’s — even if the child is a teenager. If you lower your bar on what you can expect from his kids, you’ll be a lot less disappointed because you’ll expect less.
I know this is your first wedding, even though you have a child from a prior relationship, and you want it to be special, but if you’re including the kids, you have to relax your views of what the wedding will really be like. So here are some options: Since your fiancé’s other two children are boycotting the wedding, giving his son the best man position will better insure that at least one of his kids will show up. This is important to your fiancé, and if you can deal with it, I think this is one you should let go and breathe through. The small group of guests probably already know your future step-son’s temperament, so if he has an outburst, it will fall on sympathetic ears. After all, he’s part of the family now. As for your son getting the wrong message by this potential reward for bad behavior, you can turn it around and create a teaching moment. Explain the autistic component to your son, and explain how important it is for your fiancé to have his son participate in the wedding because his other two children will not be there. You can tell him that not all divorced families get along as well as others, and that that’s kind of normal. Your son is going to have to grow up a little faster and a little more differently than if he was not part of a blended family. That’s not a bad thing. It’s just a difference from what you’re used to. If you want to give your son a special part in the wedding so things are more balanced, that’s fine, too. It sounds like not including children at all is going to create more drama, now that your fiancé and his son want his son to be in the wedding. Your question about wanting veto power over his best man, since you ran your maid of honor by him, is really just your way of wanting some control over the wedding, and instead of having him run things by you, it would be more productive to open conversations about this issue, rather than getting into power plays over it.
Remember that in blended family marriages, the divorce rate is higher than in first marriages where there are no kids to start off, because the dynamics between the children and the parents (even with adult children) is complicated. This is a perfect place for you to start off your marriage letting him know that you love him, and it’s not your first choice, but you want to do what he wants because it’s important to him. In other words, give him this gift of letting his difficult son be in the wedding, because the son is a teenager and is conflicted.
Keep your eye on the ball, which is balancing the dynamics and not sweating the small stuff. I hope that helps.
