Stepmom's House Rules: Part 3

In Stepmom's House Rules Part 1, I laid out the set of rules I'd created with my family.
In Stepmom's House Rules Part 2, I defended my reasons for creating said rules.
In Stepmom's House Rules Part 3, (the final installment), I'm going to offer a little more explanation behind the rules and why they were created in the first place.

My blended family is made up of a traveling husband and 2 stepkids who are with me most evenings until 7-8 p.m. The kids spend the weekends with my husband and I on the weekends he's home (usually every other weekend).

We've had some bumps in the road this year and it's caused me to re-prioritize a lot of my former needs and wants as far as relationships and rules were concerned.

For a while, I didn't care how messy the house got and I let the kids and my husband not pitch in because I thought it would make everyone's life easier. Essentially, I felt like if I made life simpler for everyone (by me doing most, if not all, of the work around the house), then everyone in the house would think "Wow, Stepmom is so cool -- she takes care of everything. Boy do we love her!"

What happens to people who take care of everything all the time? Burnout.

I started to resent how much I was doing and how little everyone else was doing. I could see how my attempts to earn respect and love from my family were only turning me into a drone who worked all day and then picked up after everyone all night and weekend long. It was depressing me and making me feel even more sad and lonely.

As any therapist or life coach would tell me, I felt the need to set parameters or boundaries for my family. Our House Rules (which is what they're officially called, not Stepmom's House Rules), are a list of boundaries for the entire family.

If you noticed in the rules, even I have boundaries. I have to keep my spending under control and only spend so much at the grocery store each week. That is out of respect for the family budget. Same goes for manners. You can't imagine how many slammed doors and unexcused farts happen in our house.

And so, with this last and final rules post, I wanted to explain that our House Rules are really a set of boundaries that each person in the house needs to live by in order to keep out of trouble with the rest of the family. I recognize there will need to be a learning curve and that the boundaries will still be tested, but at least everyone knows what they are now instead of the list of "what I need" and "what I want" swirling around in my head.

So, in the wise words of Porky Pig: That's all folks!

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Coming up tomorrow: Awards!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!