Because parent-child bonds predate the new marital bonds, often by many years, and are there- fore initially stronger than the couple bond, remar- ried families must allow for the built-in ambiguity of roles and the differential ties based on histori- cal connections. In particular, each parent needs to accept responsibility for his or her own children and not combat or compete with the other's parent-child attachments.
Previous experience with nontraditional gender roles may increase the flexibility necessary for stepfamily organization. Forming a remarried family requires a re-visioning of traditional gender roles. We must overturn completely the notion that the stepmother, just because she is a woman, should be in charge of the home, the children, or the emotional relationships of the system. Such a view fails to respect the family's history, that is, that the parent with the historical relationship with the child is the only one who can really be the primary par- ent. Traditional gender roles, requiring women to take responsibility for the emotional well-being of the family, have placed stepmothers in an unten- able position, through the expectation that she can automatically be "mother" to children with whom she has no connection (Martin, 2009). This pits her against the children's mother, a contest she is bound to lose. The traditional rules that called for women to rear children and men to earn and manage the finances do not work well in first-marriage fami- lies. They have no chance at all in a system in which some of the children are strangers to the wife.
In addition, the finances of remarried families include sources of income and expenditure that are not in the husband's power to generate or control (e.g., alimony, child support, and earnings of the ex- wife or current wife). These issues, in addition to the primacy of children's bonds to their original parents, make traditional gender roles completely inappropri- ate for remarried families.
For poor families, there are often even more difficulties: children raised with little connection to their fathers and often living with what Burton and her colleagues refer to as "othermothers," not really stepmothers, because the roles are not that stabi- lized and formalized and where children may need to deal with a series of partners their parents con- nect with, who may or may not take on parenting roles with them (Burton & Hardaway, 2012; Burton & Tucker, 2009).
The Divorce-Remarriage Cycle
Our concept of the divorce and post-divorce emo- tional process can be thought of as a roller coaster with peaks of emotional tension at all transition points:
•At the time of the decision to separate or divorce
•When this decision is announced to family and friends
•When money and custody/visitation arrangements are discussed
•When the physical separation takes place
•When the actual legal divorce takes place When separated spouses or ex-spouses have contacted about money or children
