When Julie met her partner online, she appreciated he put his kids first

One of the best things about having a blended family is experiencing the beauty that can blossom when two worlds collide. When you have a child with someone who already has older children, you feel a safety and reassurance that perhaps you may not feel with someone who’s doing it all for the first time. My son also has the dynamic of two older siblings, which is wonderful to experience. I’m not saying everything is perfect all the time. I think our greatest challenge is about me learning when to step up, when to step to the side and how to balance my various roles. It’s a way of living and growing that teaches you emotional agility and the importance of being adaptive.

I think there’s still this societal idea in the dating world that those with kids are to be avoided, but provided you talk about the big issues right at the beginning, you really can transform your relationship into something beautiful.”

“Finding my identity after my partner’s death is hard”

Tom Chin, 64, became a single parent of three after the unexpected passing of his long-term partner in 2019.

“The very first moment I laid eyes on Michael, I knew we were going to spend our lives together. I had just taken up a teaching post in a primary school where he was to be my co-teacher, and when I saw him sitting on the floor of the corridor talking to the children, I was struck dumb. It was 1987 and it was love at first sight for the both of us.

My life with Michael was as exciting as any love story can be. We travelled the globe and grew – both as individuals and as a couple, and eventually in 2011 we decided it was time to start a family. Even before our surrogacy journey, we researched as much as we could, attending daddies’ groups and baby-care classes to learn all that we could. When our daughter was born in 2013, Michael took to it like a duck to water, while we joked that I took to it like a job. After our twin boys followed just a year later, Michael took the term off school to spend time with our firstborn so she wouldn’t feel left out.

Michael and I were about to get married when he passed away of a heart attack in 2019 aged 64. We picked up our wedding rings on Friday and on Saturday he was gone. As he died in my arms, I knew I had to push the grief to one side to focus on the children, and even today – almost five years on – this is still very much the case.

I no longer work so that I can be home at 3pm, and we always holiday in the same place so they can feel a sense of safety in routine. It hasn’t been easy. In Australia, our families have become quite nuclear so you can no longer rely on the support of an extended family, but my kids are growing up to become strong, quietly confident people who I’m incredibly proud of.

Parenting solo can be tough, but finding my identity after having been with and loved Michael for so long is even harder. Most people lose the love of their life when they’re far older, but I’m aware that while I still have the energy and resources to write the next chapter, I should probably get cracking. I don’t know what that looks like yet – I’m dipping my toe into new things like expressive art classes, for example – but right now it needs to be all about the children and what they need.”

“My father and I are scarily alike”

Dilvin Yasa, 45, was a preschooler when the man she would come to know as Dad began dating her mother.

“Earlier this year, I realised I’d never told my daughters, who are 14 and 10, that my dad isn’t my biological father. My lack of disclosure wasn’t intentional; I’ve just never seen him as anything other than my ‘real’ dad, so the topic has hardly been top of mind.

Besides, I knew my daughters would feel the same way and I was right – the update on their beloved grandad was barely acknowledged with a shrug before they both moved on. They know as well as I do that families of your own choosing are far superior to bloodlines, and besides, my teenager noted: ‘There is no one on this planet who loves another person quite like Dede [the Turkish word for grandfather] loves you.’

I met the man who would become my dad when I was a preschooler, and I was in the room when he asked my grandparents for their daughter’s hand in marriage. It was a brave move; my mother was, and still is, magnificence personified, but she was also a single mother of three. Desperate for a father of my own – my mother’s first husband was not on the scene – I couldn’t call the man ‘Dad’ fast enough, and we became inseparable from day dot.

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Taking on a fully realised family must have been tough, but he handled it with an elegance that few could match. Rather than coming in like a bull in a china shop and setting all kinds of rules and boundaries, he parented gently and led by example.

At a time when all the other kids were reading The Baby-Sitters Club, Dad would buy me Virginia Woolf and then pay me to write a detailed synopsis about each novel I’d read, effectively training me to become a writer while I was still in pigtails. To date, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard him say an unkind word about another person – even if they really deserve it – and I try to model everything he has taught me. People say we’re scarily alike, but if I can be half the person he is, I’ll die insisting I’m the ultimate success story.

I’m aware that some people aren’t so lucky when it comes to step-parents but many biological parents aren’t exactly great shakes either. I feel so strongly about our father-daughter connection that I bristle when I hear someone refer to him as my stepdad. The way I see it, anyone can father a child, but it takes a real man to be a dad.”

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