The Cost of a Ready-Made Family

I was 36 when my boyfriend proposed. Given that I had already fallen in love with his three young children, I don’t think anything could have stopped me from committing. I was ready to trade everything that made my single life look fun on social media—the global travel for work and weekend spa retreats. I was convinced it was far less fulfilling than soccer practice and twilight walks around the pond looking for bugs.

All I wanted was the kind of stability that came on a cul-de-sac with a two-car garage. After moving frequently during my formative years—becoming the new girl in school every year between ages 13 and 18—I ached for that pillared house brimming with laughter, no moving box or packing tape in sight. And since I was unable to carry a baby myself, I deemed this ready-made family my last chance to create an anchoring I never had growing up.

On paper, my boyfriend was the ultimate safe choice: a devoted dad with a steady corporate job. He had a larger-than-life presence on rented ballroom stages and industry podcasts. Our incomes were roughly equal, before factoring in his child support and alimony payments. He told me constantly that I would make a wonderful stepmother, that we’d have a special, warm house where everyone felt safe.

That illusion fractured one month after we said “I do.”

After we’d completed some urgent house repairs, I Venmo-ed him $2,200 for my half. Weeks later, I watched him grill chicken for the neighbors, casually gesturing toward the new porch beams and sharing the contractor’s contact information. Soon after, that same contractor tracked me down on my office phone, threatening to sue for the full $4,400 he was owed. When, months later, I overheard my husband whispering to a bill collector, I eventually extracted a confession: He had tens of thousands of dollars in debt that he omitted from our prenuptial balance sheet.

I shamefully asked my parents to bail us out. Seeing the look in their eyes the next time they came to hang out with their grandkids, I knew they’d lost respect for my husband. I’d already been through one divorce; now I worried I was headed for another.

But I didn’t want out. Our house had become the gathering place I’d always longed for. We hosted parties and cookouts, and in my mind’s eye, our suburban Chicago lot may as well have sparkled like a gem on Google Maps. So I stayed, without quite realizing the trade-off I was making.

In front of our couples therapist, my husband agreed to live on an allowance and put me fully in charge of the money. But it wasn’t long before our front porch was littered with big-ticket items—a Tumi suitcase (there were three in his collection already) and an expensive new thermostat to replace our perfectly functional Nest. When I had the flu and he went to the grocery store with my debit card for medicine, my bank statement itemized a cash withdrawal for $100, which he claimed was for toys for the kids.

Still, I was living the life I always wanted as a stepmom. Every time anxiety about our cash flow and his financial indiscretions threatened to break me, I focused on dribbling the basketball in the driveway, playing the animal-guessing game, and reciting bedtime meditations. I wondered if my annual bonus would be enough to cover the bills, then got one kiss on the cheek, or held one hand at a pumpkin patch, and I was right back to being all in.

On one late January afternoon, I snuggled with the kids on the couch watching Wall-E while my husband was in his home office. When my phone vibrated, I opened a text from my bank with a fraud alert, asking if I’d made an online purchase of $4.26 to the United States Postal Service. I had not. I tiptoed to his door just as he was putting my credit card back into my purse.

Even as my savings account dwindled, I felt like I’d handcuffed myself to him, to our life, to his kids. I berated myself for standing up in front of everyone I knew and making vows not only to him (“for better or worse, for richer or poorer”), but also to his children, promising I would always be there.

And so we continued with the unspoken agreement that would ultimately break us: I’m only here for your kids, and you’re using me for my money. That foundation, of course, was too porous to hold, and we divorced in less than two years.

Discussing Belle Burden’s memoir, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, in my book club recently, my friends and I parsed the seduction of financial compliance that she thrust into the zeitgeist. “I think that there was something romantic, almost, about handing this over to him,” Burden wrote of letting her husband control her money early in their marriage.

Reading the agonizing account of her 20-year marriage unraveling, I nodded vigorously at her admission of giving her ex-husband far too much control over their shared resources. I related intimately to the fog of her financial derangement—though when I was trapped inside the claustrophobic center of my partner’s secret spending, the geometry was different. Every time I considered walking away, I was paralyzed with the fear that the children I treated as my own would disappear the moment I signed the paperwork.

In the end, it wasn’t so much that I didn’t know the man I married, but that I became a stranger to myself. I’d hung onto the marriage for my own emotional fulfillment, and the kids ended up serving as collateral.

My time as an official stepmother lasted exactly 887 days before our 2018 divorce. Miraculously, though, I still get to see the kids for birthdays and holidays.

While my desperation for an idyllic home life blinded me, I eventually rebuilt my life back up from financial and emotional bankruptcy. But I’ll never stop missing those three kids who let me share the richness of their childhood.