When I met a man with young children, I did a mental, “Oh man, here we go.”

Everyone who’s been in those shoes has said that step-parenting is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. It can make or break a marriage. Combining two different parenting styles is a shock to all involved; in the extreme version, the parents have to compromise on what’s appropriate behavior. One set of kids has to watch while the other set gets away with things they never would have, and the other set has to suddenly mind rules where they never had to before.

I’ve always been a pretty strict parent. Even though I only had the boys half the time for a long time, it was still my job to teach them manners, to raise them to be good adults. I never felt that it was my job to be their friend, although my kids and I do like each other fine, for the most part. But I had to be the only adult in the house for a long time, so I was always the bad guy enforcing the rules. I grew up in a fairly rigid structure; we had fun, but I had enough manners run into me to know how to formally set a table and how to conduct myself around adults without screaming for attention all of the time.

Junior had his kids much less often than I did, and the rules were much more relaxed around his house. So their behavior was a shock to my system. Besides that I wasn’t going to be able to stand to be around holy terrors for very long, these kids needed some basic life skills, which I happen to be equipped to teach them. The mechanism of how I teach them has been hammered out between their father and I. I have to try to be less strict than I would normally be inclined to be, which my kids find unfair, and he’s promised to back up the calls that I do make.

It’s been working OK. These aren’t stupid children, just kids that hadn’t ever been exposed to much civility. They’ve learned how to use napkins and table utensils, and not to pick to bowl of peas up at a restaurant and slurp straight out of it. In exchange, they get to have home-cooked family meals at our house, where we all sit around the table with the TV off instead of the near-constant fast-food they get the rest of the time. They like to help set the table, and they’re starting to pick up a little cooking, which they like. I like to let each kid help bake their own birthday cake from scratch, and this makes them happy.

The household is evening out, slowly but surely. There’s a defined set of roles, and each person knows what’s expected of them. They’ve all got chores, which they do without too much complaining. They get to have fun, especially outdoor fun, with the pool and the dogs and the lawns and the bikes. We’re making this home into a good place for kids to grow up, but part of that is their responsibility too, and they’re all four stepping up to the plate.

Before this, I didn’t quite appreciate the decent working relationship I’d developed with the boys’ father. It seemed natural to me that rules at one house would carry over to the other. If one kid is grounded from television at his dad’s, then there you go. Grounded at my house too. If the other kid had been doing nothing but talking back to me all week, I could reasonably expect that he’d spend his afternoons pulling weeds at his other house. If they had something to do over there on one of my days, no biggie, and the same went the other way. Their standards were pretty similar to mine, and it worked fairly well.

So there’s the big ugly monkey wrench in our combined family. Of course kids are going to say they prefer the house with the anything-goes rules. Of course they aren’t going to admit that they might have fun with me now and then when their mother is an expert at emotional blackmail. They’ve said flat-out that she doesn’t like to hear nice things about us, and they’ve artfully dodged the question of just how much prying their mother does. I would never have guessed that a parent would call the child at the other parent’s house just to work them up into tears when they were perfectly happy before the phone rang. It never occured to me to lay my load of insecurities on a seven year old. It boggles the mind. Supposedly, if you listen to the other side, they hate me and don’t want to be at our house. Of course, last year it was their father they hated, so she might want to get her story straight, but since it’s coming from her and not them, the confusion is understandable. Sure, they don’t have a slave to follow them around picking up trash in their wake at our house, but they sure seem to like the family structure we do have. It’s been harder and harder to pry them away from whatever they’re doing to go back; I don’t see that as a sign of kids hating their life.

They may prefer to be spoiled at this age, but I guarantee you, when they’re adults and looking back on their lives, they’ll remember. They’ll remember who taught them how not to make fools of themselves on dinner dates. They’ll remember who taught them to cook and grow their own food. They’ll have a lifetime of happy fun family things to look back on, from summers in the pool to hunting camp each fall. They’ll know who taught them to stand up for themselves and to be their own people, and who gave them the life skills and freedom to do it.

It’s just going to be awfully challenging to get them there with all of the interference from the other side. So I’ll continue to be the wicked stepmother when it would be much easier to just take the path of least resistance, and I will raise four healthy and self-sufficient adults. And it is certainly by far the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.