Maria Flores, Marriage and Family Institute, San Antonio; Arlene Fisher, Family Services of Greater Houston; Francesca Adler-Baeder, Auburn University.
She was in New Orleans for work. He was there for a bachelor's party.
They met by chance at a bar on Bourbon Street and found they had lots to talk about.
Robbie Plaisance was a single dad and recently divorced.Kristen Kwiecinski, a single mom, had left her rocky marriage several years earlier and was already done with the grief and anger.
Despite some qualms, Kristen, a photographer, gave Robbie, in oil field sales, her phone number. She could mentor him as a friend, she thought, as he went through his healing process.
But friendship turned into love. Love turned into marriage. And that's when things got interesting.
He had two children, she had two, and after their marriage in 2000, they had No. 5, a son.
Naturally, they thought they were going to be one blissful blended family a la the Brady Bunch. Unfortunately, their home turned into a war zone instead.
The stepbrothers got along fine. But there was trouble as soon as the 7-year-old girls met, and Robbie's daughter tried to run over Kristen's daughter with a Barbie Jeep.
What did little Chelsy find so aggravating about little Cherish, the horrified parents wanted to know?
Her hair bow, Chelsy said.
Therapists nod sympathetically when they hear the story. Children may not be able to explain their feelings of loss and turmoil as they are propelled into a new family unit, but it takes a combination of patience, understanding and time to heal the wounds.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 17 percent of all U.S. children under age 18 — 12.2 million — live in blended families. Adds Francesca Adler-Baeder, an associate professor at Auburn University, half of all American marriages end in divorce, at least 75 percent of those individuals remarry, and most of them have children from previous relationships.
Taking two splintered groups and smoothing them into one, cooperative family unit may take counseling, Adler-Baeder says. To that the Plaisances say, “Amen.” The girls were constantly competing for friends, attention and material possessions. Kristen and Robbie tried to be firm but patient.
Inevitably, they'd wind up frustrated with the girls and fighting themselves.
“The girls would get over it,” Kristen says, “but we'd still be upset with each other.”
Finally the Plaisances went to counseling and came up with some house rules that made sense to the kids and to them, too. Kristen and Robbie learned not to plant themselves in the middle of the girls' fights. They also realized that the blending of a family is a process that takes about five years.
Perhaps what helped the family most was sending Cherish and Chelsy to couples' counseling. Today, they're both 16 and as close as, well, sisters.
“It's been stressful, and there were times when I thought we weren't going to make it,” Kristen says. “But peace has descended on our family. I wouldn't trade my biological children or my stepchildren for anything in the world.”
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