By Elaine Cantle Shimberg (Berkley Publishing, 1999)

I remember making a dreadful mistake one day and offering a friend of my teenage daughter. some advice. “Hey, Mom,” my daughter reprimanded, “enough. One mother is all that any one needs.”

Hmm. Maybe that’s true. But with today’s extended families, one mother, one stepmother, one father, one stepfather, and scores of other kin, step and biological, it isn’t all that simple.

It’s especially un-simple for the raft of grandparents who are thrust into the role of stepgrandparenting. They muddle through without any biological connection and without any guidance. (To the best of my knowledge, there is no popular literature devoted solely to stepgrandparenting.) Most are unsure of where the boundaries are. Many throw up their hands and don’t treat their stepgrandchildren as anything more than kids who must be endured. Others are caught in a twist of emotions wanting to do the right thing for their stepgrandchildren, yet having a much stronger feeling for their biological young kin and feeling guilty about it.

In Blending Families: A guide for parents, stepparents, grandparents and everyone building a successful new family, Elaine Fantle Shimberg comes to the conclusion that no child can have too many grandparents as part of a solid foundation. In fact, she says, grandparents are “the great equalizer in a child’s life; they are the strong safety in the ‘them vs. us’ game, which pairs grandparent and grandchild against the parent.”

But when you become an instant grandparent as a result of your son or daughter marrying someone with children, the bonding isn’t instant and it’s not necessarily grandparental. First of all, she says in a chapter devoted solely to grandparents, you don’t have to love these new

children. That emotion might or might not come much later. But you can be supportive and initiate a relationship, even if the child is reticent or sullen at first - in part because you’re older and more mature than the child.

And Shimberg has a number of excellent suggestions to foster the positive connections between the two generations who are merely bystanders in a life drama scripted by the middle generation. Here are some.

- Do things that bring you together in ways that don’t necessitate talking -like watching a favorite TV show together or going to your step grandson’s football game and cheering for him.

- Just listen. “In this busy world, a youngster’s parents and stepparents often don’t have (or make) the time for good old-fashioned one-on-one listening.”

- Share some of your skills, like cooking, repairing things, playing chess with them.

The most difficult situation a grandparent finds himself or herself in is having a combination of biological and stepgrandchildren. That may be why Shimberg devotes less than a page to this scenario. She ducks the questions because there are no easy answers. Yes, she says, fairness counts. But what if you want to take your 13year-old granddaughter on a trip for her birthday or help your grandson with college tuition, must you do the same for stepgrandchildren? You get the feeling from Shimberg that as long as the stepchildren think the step-grandparent wants to be fair (even if it doesn’t turn out that stepgrandparents don’t spend an equal amount of time or money on them as they do with their biological grandchildren), all will be well.

It’s a leap of faith - but one we assume Shimberg herself took since she dedicated the book to her step grandson Joshua.