'The first night I met my new partner's kids, I was nervous. Then one of them wrote him a note.'

The following is an extract from: A Bit on the Side: Reflections on What Makes Life Delicious by Virginia Trioli.

At the age of thirty-six, I became an accidental stepmother. The man I'd fallen in love with had three children from his previous marriage.

I only realise now how alarmingly unconcerned I was about stepping into a new family, about interrupting my life and Russell's children's lives by becoming a partner to him. Now I can hear the warning tones in the voices of those who love me as they gently inquired about how serious this love affair was, but I couldn't hear their concern at all back then. A thumping heart can drown out so much.

But I do remember thinking very early on, after realising that this relationship was important to me and that, despite all the odds, we had chosen each other, that I needed some kind of working approach for my unexpected new role. I was going to become a quasi-parent to three young people who had no need of a new adult in their lives, and I had to figure that role out quickly. When I was with them, and if circumstances tossed us into a moment that required a parental choice, then I had to know what I was doing and why I was choosing to do it in that way. I had come from a very large family and didn't so much leave home at eighteen as flee it, desperately seeking a calmer, quieter environment. I think that's why I spent so many years living on my own.

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I was not a child of divorce, but I was a daughter of unhappiness, and I hated the thought of being the author of any more of that.

So, I formulated a private rule for myself, for good or for ill, that would be the guiding principle for my new role. It was a solemn truth about the reality of a blended family, and it would be tried and tested over and again.

From the very first, the kids greeted me with genuine warmth and acceptance, which I just took to be the hallmark of polite children. It was. In truth, they had all sorts of feelings about meeting me.

I was introduced to the boys first, as they were living with their father in Tokyo when I arrived on one of my early visits to him in Japan. They were, and still are, the funniest, smartest, most mischievous boys. They are identical twins – one is left-handed, one is right, in a perfect split of that miraculous egg. They look less like each other now that they have grown older. They spoke a private language that had them finishing each other's sentences, doubled over in incomprehensible laughter. I remember travelling with them through rural Japan, staying at a tiny remote onsen in which our downy futon and charcoal pillows were lined up alongside each other in a row of four (a confronting thing for a new girlfriend and her partner's kids). They would spend the night in hysterical whispers, choking with barely suppressed laughter, me smiling in the dark as I drifted off. They also quarrelled tremendously, and still do.

Watching twins grow up makes you feel something like David Attenborough: they are a species all to themselves. On the night of my arrival, we went to dinner at the local, raucous izakaya, where the chefs knelt on cushions in front of the glowing coals of their cooking stations. They handed Russell and me small bamboo boxes of sake which they balanced on the backs of long paddles and carefully passed over the top of the coals on which they were grilling our food. We all loved that place. It's since become a bit of a tourist trap – Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took Donald Trump there – but the food was superb: obscure fungi and delicate cuts of meat and fish cooked to the touch on smoking coals, made more delicious by the appreciative roars of the chefs all around you.

We came home late, and the boys cleverly formed into a wedge around their dad, arguing that they really should take the next day off school in honour of my visit. It was very funny. I discreetly retired to the bedroom as they began what has always been a family tradition of long discussions and Bosnian-level negotiations around conflicting positions.

The next morning, we woke to find Daniel had left a note for Russell: he'd heard all his dad's arguments, and he respected them, but nonetheless, he wasn't going to school that day and would take full responsibility for his actions. The note had a PS: 'I think you should marry Virginia.' I wish I had kept it.

I met Rebecca when she came to Tokyo a little later, and even though there was no basis nor reason for us to come together in anything more than kindness and politeness, the almost-immediate trust and intimacy of our friendship is something very special to me. She is a quite remarkable woman; someone I greatly admire and whose company I love. We dove into deep conversation from the start and have never looked back. I have always considered myself beyond lucky to come to know three such terrific children. Their mother Wendy takes an enormous amount of credit for this.

We moved in together when Russell returned from Japan, and I had no guidebook for how to become an instant stepmum. But I'd had that instinct about creating and holding on to a kind of precept if the situation wasn't going to overwhelm me, and if I was to have a chance at being my best self.

So, I started with this belief: that if I shook the kids awake in the middle of the night and asked them what their most cherished wish was, what they most desperately wanted, it would be that their parents were happily back together and that none of this had ever happened.

I don't know of any divorce that is easy, or of any young children who aren't left with the shadows or trauma that come from the end of that primary family unit. I believed that if I kept that yearning reality uppermost in my mind, then my actions and my choices would be framed by an acceptance of the everyday existence of sorrow, and that might allow us to find new joys.

I was never going to be 'best friend' stepmum – sharing clothes, sneaking cigarettes together. There's too much Italian in me for that. (Although a joy that has come later in life is doing a bit of that with them now – minus the cigarettes – as they entered their thirties. Rebecca and I have a social life together that I love.)

Instead, I cooked. I made cakes and desserts and treats. I baked and preserved and often had delicious things mari- nating or soaking or cooling. I made dinners and invited friends over who would become honorary aunts and uncles to the children and who were the beginnings of our new, extended family. Russell and I tried to make a lively and convivial home with the cooking and serving of food as the light and warmth that brought us all together.

Watch: A spoken word video staring Laura Bryne articulating the contradiction of pressures that mothers face in their daily lives. Post continues after video.

Oh, the relief of kids who are good eaters! I can't think of a thing they wouldn't eat or to which they wouldn't later suggest an addition or alteration. Daniel has an uncanny ability to find the really special piece of cheese or charcuterie I've hidden in the fridge for a special dinner with friends. 'What's this?' he'll ask mildly as he unearths a triple cream from below a kilo of oranges. They were good emerging cooks, too. Tim would grab our copy of Blakes, the modern Melbourne classic of the '90s by chef Andrew Blake, and enthuse that he wanted to cook yabby salad with gazpacho sauce: he never did want to crawl before he could run. It was a struggle in the early years for Russell and me to maintain our crucial Friday night date, as the kids would eagerly cluster around the kitchen bench asking, 'So what are we eating tonight?' Over the years their main complaint was finding 'nothing to eat' in the fridge, even after the most enormous market shop. 'Yes, but you don't buy food,' they would anguish, 'you buy ingredients.'

I once asked Rebecca, Daniel and Tim if my early apprehension was right: if they always felt the loss of their family as a hole that could never be filled. They said sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't – and that their understanding of family changed as time went on and as we found our places with each other. I may have been wrong in deciding the nature of my own path that way, but it's the choice I made, and all I know is that we love each other very much and that coming together over food is one of the happiest things we do.

Okay, at this point I feel ethically obliged to acknowledge that we have had some truly awful times together, too. Times when I have not been at my best – grumpy, impatient and harsh. And raising teenagers can be hard. The slamming doors that still ring in my ears, the non-cooperation, the teenage scorn.

One experience we never had was that notorious change from chatty, eager-eyed kids to sullen, silent teenagers. I would slope in the door at dinnertime after my shift on Melbourne drivetime radio, and they would be there to greet me with a dozen peppy questions: 'Hi! Who was on the show? What did you do? How did it go?'

Usually, I was the sullen one, begging for just a few minutes of quiet time after three frantic hours on air. There were many evenings when Russell and the kids found me locked in my room, and they had to gentle me down the stairs to join everyone for dinner. Rebecca, always the one with the noticing eyes and heart, seemed to have an instinct for when someone needed just a moment to breathe, to re-set. Her self-containment helped me do the same.

A Bit on the Side: Reflections on What Makes Life Delicious by Virginia Trioli is now available for purchase.

A Bit on the Side: Reflections on What Makes Life Delicious by Virginia Trioli. Image: Supplied.

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Feature Image: Instagram @latrioli.