Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband Brad Falchuk have opened up about the realities of parenting a blended family.
When the pair got married in 2018, they were also bringing together Gwyneth’s children Apple, 20 and Moses, 19 from her previous relationship with Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, as well as Brad’s children Isabella, 20 and Brody, 18 from his marriage to his ex-wife Suzanne Bukinik.
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But the act of getting married didn’t make them a family, with the couple sharing it took years of work to get to a good place with each other’s children.
The 52-year-old shared on her The goop Podcast that she and her husband’s children “traversed through some really rough, rough things”.
“One of my most profound lessons that I learned from my relationship with your daughter – which is now so fantastic – is that I think there was a testing going on.”
Isabella, now 20, “was testing me all the time to see at what point I would reject her. And at some point, I decided, like, I just need to be exactly… the essence of maternal. Without opinions, without words, without corrections.
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“I was just going to be that presence for her – always loving and forgiving in the face of, you know, if she like acted up and show her that ultimately I was so there for her, that she would not question my intentions, or, you know, think that I was there to take you away from her.”
It didn’t come easy for the entrepreneur, who found herself falling into a triggering dynamic with her stepdaughter.
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“This dynamic gets triggered by the child who is resentful or scared, or any normal set of feelings that come around this idea that they’re going to lose their dad, or their relationship with their dad is going to change,” the Sliding Doors actress said.
“And so, they push back or they act out, they’re demonstrative in some way, like behaviourally, that creates friction.
She admitted, “I fell into this trap a couple of times of being triggered by a child… Like it hits at something so core and so primal, which I think is like probably specific to each person.
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She began to ask herself, “Am I lovable? Am I accepted too? It’s like my core stuff gets challenged by the child’s behavior.”
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Eventually the family cam to a good place with a lot of communication and a strict schedule of Wednesday night family dinners.
Now Paltrow reflects, ”I’ve never had a clear opportunity to like ascend to my highest self more than in my role as a stepmother
“Because I think it required like a mastery over my own impulses, my own damage, my own weaknesses, my own, my ego, all the things, you know, it was really like I had to, I had to talk to myself. I had to like actively remind myself to be the adult at all times. And there were like a few moments that were really, really hard.”
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