Brenda Cronin's father died when she was in her 40s. Then her mother remarried, and Cronin got a stepbrother and a stepsister she never expected. The family of nine children became five boys and six girls, all middle-aged. A friend heard the news and told her the rich get richer. Her essay in Thursday's Journal, Oct. 15, says he was right.
Steps have a bad name, and fiction did most of the damage. Cinderella and Snow White gave us the wicked stepmother. Dickens gave David Copperfield a stepfather who is cruel past all reason. Real life has its stories too. Raine McCorquodale married Earl Spencer in 1976, and his children, Diana among them, called her “Acid Raine” for years. Yet when Diana's own marriage was coming apart, Cronin notes, she went to her stepmother for comfort.
Cronin's own experience ran the other way from the start. Her stepfather had raised a tidy nuclear family. In his 80s and 90s he found himself at the head of a longer, louder table, watching his wife's children and grandchildren arrive in waves. Mothers who'd married men with kids warned her to run from step situations. She married a father of two anyway. His son and daughter were in their 20s and launched, with a mother of their own who'd done the hard years. Cronin counts them as gifts, along with four godchildren and 16 nieces and nephews. Lately the young people are getting married. When a bride walks down the aisle, she says, she doesn't see a niece or a stepdaughter. She sees a young woman starting a new chapter.
The part the essay leaves out, and we add
This is our label, and the essay doesn't carry it. Cronin's family is now the normal kind. Second marriages late in life, stepchildren who are adults, a spouse with children from before. Love handles the dinner table. Paper has to handle the rest. A will that leaves things to 'my children' usually means your legal children only. A beneficiary form on a 401(k) or an IRA overrides the will entirely, and it still names whoever was written there the day it was signed. A stepfather in his 90s with a new, bigger family needs those forms to say what he means.
Our read
We file this under Estate, and we'll say plainly that the angle is ours. The essay is warm and has no legal point to make. Blended families are common and happy. The trouble comes when the documents were written for the family you had before. A spouse's children from a first marriage, your own children, a stepchild you raised. Each shows up in a will, a trust or a beneficiary form only if someone wrote them in. Stepchildren usually have no automatic place under state law when there's no will. That's the one hard fact worth knowing.
Here's the connection to your own plan. If you or a parent has remarried, pull the beneficiary forms this week, the 401(k), the IRA, the life insurance, and read the names on them. Then read the will's definition of children and see whether it matches the family at your table now. One mismatch is common and fixable, and it's far cheaper to fix with a form than in a courtroom. Nobody shops for an umbrella in the downpour. A plan review is where these forms get read before anyone needs them.