Blissfully Blended Bullshit Read online

  “I was surprised she was so pissed. But she felt shunned,” he says. “So it’s always rocky when we travel, and the trip never starts well, because I’m not sure how to make both her and my kids happy on the plane. And, yes, I get an earful for it and reassure her that she’s not being left out. So neither of us is happy.”

  Yay! I’m not the only one who is woefully unprepared for the silly fights that feel like slights.

  When you’re travelling with a blended family, you do really wonder, In the event of a drop in cabin pressure, whose oxygen mask would go on first?

  · NINE ·

  Because I’m a journalist, I like to read and research and interview people. You’d think I would have done this before I got involved in a blended family. I was too busy enjoying life with my new guy and his children, while also taking care of my daughter and Baby Holt. I didn’t spend time researching because I was living in the moment! I was happy!

  But I start reading up about blended families, years after we have blended, when things start to get worse, not better, and Boyfriend and I are now fighting — over the money I think he owes me, about who takes more care of the baby, over the fact his dog has ruined yet another pair of underwear, and over how we can’t seem to fit in one date night a week. The backyard fights are almost daily now, away from the ears of our children but probably to the delight of our neighbours, who, too, are in a blended-family situation. I often wonder if they overhear our heated arguments, and if so, do they think what we’re fighting over is insane? Do they get bored of our fights? Often we fight over things we have already fought over. We have “discussions,” as Boyfriend likes to call our disagreements, over discussions that we have already discussed. Or maybe our neighbours are all like, “They are so like us!”

  My neighbour entered her second marriage with one child, marrying a man with no children. They went on to have two children of their own. But I never hear them arguing in their backyard. I hear them yell at the kids when they are in the pool, but I never hear any arguments between them. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact they bought the house next door together, as opposed to her moving into his house or him moving into her house? They started fresh.

  Experts, as I’ve said, profess it can take up to five years for everyone in a blended family to feel truly relaxed around each other and in their new roles. So why, I have to ask, are things getting worse after five years of blending in my household? Why does it seem so much harder than it was in the early years? When did everybody start tiptoeing around each other? When did I turn into such a nag? When did Boyfriend’s actions, or lack of action, start to exasperate me? And when did I start not wanting to come home at all?

  I’ve become obsessed with my Google searches. I search phrases like “blended family problems,” “successful blended families,” and “why blended families don’t work.” I even search “when to leave a blended family.” I get caught in the vortex of the internet, finding either nothing that applies to me or stuff that seems to apply but then provides advice that is just common sense or vague. I start to wonder if “experts” are on acid when they write these articles and blogs handing out “advice” and “tips.” Like, I know Boyfriend and I moved fast, but advice like, “Don’t expect to fall in love with your partner’s children overnight,” or, “Insist on respect,” or, “Limit your expectations” doesn’t seem all that helpful or insightful or even doable. It’s not only that it’s easier said than done, but who can give advice when they don’t get down to the nitty gritty of what it’s really like to blend? Or what you should do after you’ve blended and didn’t discuss anything? Sure, I’ve read about the problems we will most likely face, but there’s nothing on, “Why you feel like you’re lower a priority in your blended family than the dog.” There’s not much on how to “fix” a blended family when it starts to break apart. There’s no warranty. I can’t get a replacement for free, to start all over again with, like I did when my dishwasher broke down. There’s no repairman for blended families. No one really knows what the fuck to do with us after we have already blended!

  So I also Google search “blended family statistics,” which is a colossal mistake, kind of like reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting and being left thinking, “Well, thanks for telling me the millions of ways I’ve already screwed up my fetus! Thanks for also letting me know the millions of things that can go wrong with my pregnancy.” Or like searching for “headache on left side of eye” on WebMD and thinking you have brain cancer, possibly MS, and also blood clots.

  The statistics on blended families are eyebrow raising at best and dire at worst. They are definitely a wakeup call. Again and again, I read that 66 percent of blended families don’t make it. These are pretty shitty odds. I don’t want to be part of that cringeworthy statistic. But I also realize that we are far from unique.

  I read that more than a thousand blended families are formed every day — every day! — in North America. I am too lazy to do the math, but that means that of the 1,300 blended families forming each day, more than half of them will end up divorced again. And who wants to wear that as a badge of honour? Who wants to be a serial divorcee? What kid wants to see their parent break up a second time? But I’m starting to get why the statistic is so fucking high. Something has shifted in our relationship, and even I don’t understand why. Sexually, we are completely compatible, and I still find him extremely sexy. But little things have started to bug me. I feel that I am often reprimanded for just being … me. My quirks that he once found cute, he doesn’t find so cute anymore. Mostly, we have become less kind to each other, and our loyalties to our children are even more divided. But doesn’t every marriage have its ups and downs?

  Apparently, nowadays, 75 percent of us who remarry will end up with someone who already has children. The statistics also show that almost half of North American children under the age of thirteen are currently living with one biological parent and that parent’s current partner. Clearly, blending is an epi-demic. Clearly, people need help! Including Boyfriend and me. We still love each other. We fight a lot but, I think, we fight for “us.” We fight for our blended family. Even when we yell, “This is just not working out!” at each other, we continue to fight for us, day after day, week after week, year after year.

  Fucking experts. They really don’t know all the bullshit that goes on behind the closed doors after years of blending, and that it seems to get worse for many of us, not better. No one can tell us why or even warn us that this can happen. I make myself stop these Google searches, instead opting to take quizzes on what cheese best suits my personality. At least, then, I get an easy answer. (Brie!) I still think Boyfriend and I will be the exception to these statistics. Sure, we basically just jumped off a cliff to blend our families. So fucking what? Wheee!

  Remember the couple who set me and Boyfriend up back when I was just looking for a distraction and a one-night stand? Well, they are now going through a horrific breakup, so ghastly it’s as though their relationship has been murdered. There is figurative blood splattered everywhere. They are part of the 66 percent who couldn’t make blended work. Their breakup is the type of epic breakdown where you feel pressured to choose sides and are forced to listen, awkwardly, to rumours (that aren’t really rumours) about midnight stealing of patio furniture from their once-blended house’s backyard, along with defamatory accusations about each other’s character. After years of trying to blend, our friends now truly seem to detest each other. Around the same time, another friend escapes her blended family — yes, it does feel for many like they have escaped — and is on her second divorce.

  “If I could go back in time, I would never have moved in with him and blended our family,” this girlfriend tells me in one of her many late-night, drunken, post-breakup phone calls. “I did everything around the house, and there was no appreciation. He knew I didn’t make a lot of money, so I tried to make up for it by making dinners and grocery shopping and cleaning the house. He would liter
ally hand me receipts for things like mouthwash, that cost less than ten dollars, for me to split with him.”

  As with the friends who set Boyfriend and me up, she’d moved in with him and the house was his. This is the first I hear of how they had split the bills inside their house, and I wonder why her soon-to-be-ex asked her to pay for half of everything, including fucking mouthwash. Apparently, from his point of view, they both used the mouthwash, so they both should split the cost of it. From my girlfriend’s point of view, she couldn’t believe, especially when they were still happy, that he would dare ask for three dollars and twelve cents when he came home with a receipt for something as small, for example, as toothpaste. Obviously, unlike in my blended household, the fact that she cleaned, made the dinners, and did the grocery shopping didn’t seem to matter at all to him. Early on in their relationship they had agreed to split all household items, though how could my friend ever imagine that would include every damn thing, from big grocery shops to items as small as dental hygiene products? I’m actually embarrassed for her ex-husband, but at the same time, I know what it’s like, whether it’s based in reality or not, to feel like your partner isn’t splitting things evenly. This is a constant argument between Boyfriend and me. He doesn’t pay rent or chip in for the mortgage or pay the insane property taxes, because he takes care of the groceries. He says it equals out. I don’t believe it.

  It doesn’t matter what my friend says to me during her drunken late-night rants or that they had agreed to split every damn household item fifty/fifty, even though he earns probably a hundred times more than what she makes. I doubt she’ll even remember these rants. Their breakup has left my friend broken and broke, and she needs to find another home for her and her two children.

  The girlfriend who set me up, meanwhile, who now also detests her now-ex, luckily finds a nice place she loves quickly, and just like that, she is no longer living in a blended household. Poof! Just like that, she is no longer part of a blended family. Poof! Just like that, she’s back to being a single mother … and back on the dating scene. I’m sure there were months, if not years, of fights leading up to their final demise, but not only did they blend quickly, they un-blended just as quickly. In the months and years to come, she will no longer have anything to do with him or his children. Poof! Just like that, she no longer has bonus children. I tell her she’s lucky they didn’t have a kid together — a platitude, but one she adamantly agrees with.

  “No, I don’t keep in touch with his kids,” says another one of my friends who couldn’t make blended splendid. “They are still pretty young. And I don’t think that will work anyway. We can’t stay in touch. It was very unhealthy for me. And I just wanted to move on as quickly as possible.”

  For many in a blended family, once you decide to break up, you’re not just breaking up. You’re un-blending, which takes even more of an emotional toll than a regular breakup, because you’re not just breaking up with you partner. You’re breaking up with a number of people. While you may think blending is hard, and it is, un-blending seems even more painful.

  Even if you do want to keep in touch with your once–bonus children, sometimes you don’t get to make that choice. Take one of my girlfriends who married a man with two children. The went on to have a son together. When they broke up — she didn’t feel appreciated, her husband would never interfere when she needed help disciplining his kids, and, also, like me, she let a lot slide because he gave her a baby after professing that he didn’t want more children when they first met — it was her ex-husband’s children who wanted nothing to do with her, even though she’s the mother of one of their siblings and treated them like her own.

  “They refuse to talk to me. They blame me for the breakup. We even tried to go to family counselling, after we split up, to figure out how to move forward and maybe keep in touch, since they are the brothers to my son. But it didn’t work. His kids thought I was the bitch that ruined the marriage. Now I have nothing to do with his children. I wanted to keep in touch with them, but they didn’t want me in their life anymore.”

  As the saying goes, “When you get married, you are also marrying their family,” but when it comes to divorce in a blended family, you are also divorcing their family. When traditional couples with children break up, parents keep in touch with their children, and children, usually, want to keep in touch with both parents. But in blended families, you lose the family you gained when blending, including children who may have been in your life for years, children who may be related, by blood, to one of your children.

  For months after their breakup, my girlfriend who had set me up with Boyfriend, self-medicates, both by using hard drugs and by going home with bartenders with hard abs, to help her “cope” with going from being in a far-from-splendid blended family back to a single household again.

  When I find out they are done for good, I should be sadder about their breakup than I am. Surprisingly, another emotion takes over: jealousy. I’m not envious about my girlfriend’s indulgence in self-medicating or free love after her breakup — I’m concerned, but I get it — but I am also, frankly, envious that my friend no longer has to deal with arguments over money, the division of chores, logistics, managing expectations, how his kids treated her, how he treated her, how their kids treated each other, how she treated her partner, and how each day brought on something new to argue about. So, yes, I’m fucking jealous, especially when Boyfriend and I fight about all of the above, plus who takes care of the baby more, and my immediate reaction is to tell him to get the fuck out of my house. No longer does my girlfriend have to live under the same roof with a throng of kids, not all of whom share the same DNA. No longer does she continually have to “work” on their relationship and make sure everyone is happy blending, trying to treat his kids equally to her own. No longer does she have to self-medicate to fall asleep after another day of blending. Above all else, no longer does my friend even have to try to pretend to enjoy being in a blended family. Lucky bitch.

  Learning of their breakup is kind of like finding out that a celebrity is headed to rehab for “exhaustion.” Not exactly earth-shattering news. It may make for good gossip within their circle of friends, but it is far from a surprise, especially after I saw and heard how they treated each other in the early days. If they were comfortable enough to bicker in front of me and Boyfriend on our double date, I could only imagine what their fights were like when no one was around. Death, taxes, and their breakup, I kind of knew in my gut, were three things that were inevitable.

  I feel a dull melancholy for weeks when I learn about it, though, as I do when I hear of anyone I care for breaking up, but I’m even sadder about theirs because they couldn’t make blending work. Their issues weren’t just between them. Their issues included all their children, arguments over who paid for what, and her feeling unappreciated and taken for granted. I know they truly loved one another when they first decided to blend. So what the hell happened to them? I don’t wonder if my blended family will eventually follow the same fate and demise, because although Boyfriend and I have started to argue over perceived slights and unresolved issues, more often than not we are, for the most part, still happy living together. Plus, after seeing my friend’s family implode and hearing about the disaster of them un-blending, breaking up a blended family seems dreadfully grisly.

  In fact, un-blending is even harder than a breakup, because you don’t break up with just your partner. Suddenly, the children that were part of your life when you blended no longer are. Suddenly, your children, who have already gone through one divorce, are now going through another one, but they’re not just losing their mom’s or dad’s partner, they’re also losing siblings, whether related by blood or not. I do think that after a traditional breakup, one that involves no kids, there should be a no-contact period. But when you’ve known your partner’s children for almost as long as you’ve known your partner, it feels absolutely wrong to ditch the kids, who never asked to be in a blended family and c
ertainly didn’t ask to go through un-blending. And when you also share a child together, obviously there needs to be contact.

  “I kept in touch via text with my ex’s two children,” says one of my friends who is also part of the 66 percent of couples who don’t make blending work. “And they were kind to my texts, always responding, thanking me for checking in on them, or saying ‘thank you’ when I would send texts wishing them good luck for things like the start of the school year or when I heard that one of them got a part-time job. But the texts became less and less frequent because, truthfully, I had moved on with my life and had slowly started to forget my old life. My ex’s children never reach out to me. I don’t think it’s because they hate me. I just think it’s because we all moved on, and they did, too. Once my ex had a serious new girlfriend, I felt like my texts to the kids were an intrusion. It became just awkward, too, because I wasn’t talking to their father. All I can say is that it is a blessing in disguise that we didn’t have a bio child together, but that doesn’t mean that his children weren’t an important part of my life. So, yes, it was like a triple breakup, all in one.”

  She says she still often thinks about her bonus children, but the thoughts are fleeting. “It kind of feels like thinking of my best friend from when I was ten years old who I lost touch with. I think of our childhood memories fondly, but we went in different directions. We don’t dislike each other. We just have nothing in common anymore. What I had in common with my bonus children was their father, and we don’t have that anymore. But even if I don’t reach out, I still think of them fondly. I definitely didn’t think I’d miss them as much as I do, because my ex and I definitely weren’t on the same page when we were all together.” Now when she thinks of reaching out to them, something stops her. Mostly, she feels wistful that she has no idea what is happening in their lives anymore.