Blissfully Blended Bullshit Read online

  Flash forward three months, and I am enjoying reading a book, lying by the pool on a Jamaican vacation, when Boyfriend comes back from a round of golf, super sweaty, with a mischievous grin and a twinkle in his beautiful blue eyes. I wonder, Did he just get a hole in one? Nope. Did he smoke some ganja? Nope.

  “I want to have a baby. I’m in. I’m all in,” he announces.

  “What?” I say, tossing my book aside. I can’t believe what I am hearing. “You want to have another baby? What made you come to that decision?” My heart starts pounding, like I think an Oscar nominee’s heart would beat in those couple of seconds before they announce the winner.

  The truth is, it isn’t me who convinces Boyfriend to have another baby so we could have a child together, one who shared both our DNA.

  One of the men he was paired up to golf with had remarried after divorce and had a reverse vasectomy to have a baby with his second wife. Incredibly, this random golfer was also a urologist. What are the fucking odds that Boyfriend would be paired up to golf with a divorced urologist, who spent his days looking at and operating on other men’s penises, who had also had a reverse vasectomy to have a baby with his second wife? Thank you, universe! (In case you were wondering, the chance of an average golfer making a hole in one is approximately 12,500 to 1.)

  “Having a baby with my second wife was the best decision I ever made,” I would learn this random urologist told Boyfriend, who obviously had been chatting about us and our relationship as they golfed.

  Right there and then, as we lie in a cabana, Boyfriend in his colourful and sweaty golf attire, he begins to tell me all about all the different, modern procedures he discussed with the golfing urologist to get the sperm out of him and into me. It is as if Boyfriend had suddenly become an expert on fertility. I listen as Boyfriend tells me about these state-of-the-art procedures, which all sound painful, expensive, time-consuming, and definitely not the Theory of Least Effort when it comes to making a baby. Much as I was all about the Theory of Least Effort back when I first hooked up with Boyfriend, I am also about the Theory of Least Effort when it comes to getting pregnant. Looking back, we may both have been suffering from heat stroke, because the easiest and quickest way — duh! — for us to get pregnant didn’t come to us immediately.

  “What if you just got a reverse vasectomy and we could just try making a baby, you know, the old-fashioned way?” I suggest, seemingly hours after we have discussed all other potential ways for me to get pregnant.

  “Yeah, I mean, that really does sound like the easiest way,” he says. Of course there is no thought about how a bio child for Boyfriend and me would integrate into our existing precious, messed-up, fuzzy blended family dynamic. I do, however, think a lot about how cute our baby would be. Would the baby look like Boyfriend, who has fair skin and gorgeous blue eyes, and who had blond hair before he went bald? Or would our baby look like my daughter and me, with our olive skin and dark hair?

  “So we’re really doing this?” I ask, holding myself back from getting up and screaming at the top of my lungs, “We’re having a baby!” while doing a happy dance, feeling even more in love with him.

  Just weeks later, after an initial consultation, I have set up a second appointment with a urologist I know from my gym for Boyfriend to have a reverse vasectomy, a procedure that takes almost five hours. His poor penis. While Boyfriend is knocked out and getting the procedure done, I sit in the waiting area, thinking of all the ways I can be a sexy nurse as he recovers. It’s the least I can do.

  While Boyfriend is in the recovery room, the urologist comes out to talk to me. He takes a seat beside me.

  “It went well. But the majority of couples I see who want a vasectomy reversal are trying to have their first baby together after a remarriage with a younger woman who has not had children,” he says. Wait, was he calling me old? He was calling me old. But it’s not not true. I’m closer to forty than I am to thirty, so I’m well aware that getting pregnant may not happen so quickly.

  “I have to warn you,” the urologist continues. “It all looks good, but because of your age, coupled with the fact that he had a vasectomy twelve years ago, it could take up to a year for you to get pregnant.” This is not something I want to hear. Urologist sounds so negative, and I’m in such a positive mood!

  Boyfriend is not pleased either when he hears about the follow-up instructions to heal from the procedure. Rule number one? No sex for a few weeks. Boyfriend and I have a lot of sex. Boyfriend needs sex. In Boyfriend’s opinion, what makes a relationship great is “to be kind and to have a lot of sex.”

  He lasts an entire two days before initiating intercourse.

  “Isn’t it going to hurt? Are you sure?” I ask. It was maybe three minutes ago that he was groaning in pain with an ice pack on his package as he walked from the washroom back to the bed at the pace of a snail.

  “I’ll just put the tip in,” he says. But the tip turns into full-blown sex. Apparently, not even a five-hour operation on his penis will hold him back, and now that he has fresh, working sperm, not only is sex fun, but there’s motivation to have a lot of it. After we have sex, I lie with my legs up in the air, praying those little swimmers do their thing. Let the strongest and fastest sperm win!

  Three months later, Boyfriend and I are pregnant. I will later refer, jokingly, to our baby as my Mid-Life Crisis Baby, especially when we argue and he says, “Having a baby was your idea!” Aside from moving in together and blending households and our children’s lives, having a baby together will be our first co-venture at being equal parents to one of our children. Or one-quarter of our children.

  Boyfriend tears up at the gender-reveal ultrasound appointment, when he finds out we’re having a boy. He’s always wanted a son. He has been nothing but supportive of my pregnancy, coming to every appointment and going out to buy me my cravings (chocolate croissants). I’ve turned into a human garbage chute. One morning, we are at a diner eating breakfast. I order the Truck Driver Special. It’s enough food for maybe four people. Momma is hungry. The server starts to walk away. “Excuse me,” Boyfriend calls out to her. “That was just her order.”

  The pregnancy hasn’t just changed my appetite; it’s changed the mood of everyone in the family. Everyone is so fucking excited it’s like we’re waiting for our first flight to Disney World, but this is a ride we get to stay on together, forever. Woo-hoo!

  Boyfriend’s mother is beyond excited to have another newborn in her family, especially since it will be a boy, who will remind her of her son. She’s psyched to have another grandson. Nana was a stay-at-home mother her entire life, and she lives and breathes for her children and grandchildren. This new baby growing in my belly has given her a new lease on life, and for a while, I feel like the ideal daughter-in-law. I’m giving her baby boy a baby boy! She likes to say to her friends, and anyone who will listen, “I’m going to have one grandchild in diapers and one graduating university!”

  My parents are excited, too, but I can tell they haven’t quite grasped their role in my blended household yet. Unlike Boyfriend’s parents, who split up after forty years of marriage, my parents have been happily married for more than fifty years. Both Boyfriend’s mother and father have found new partners, so Boyfriend himself is from a blended family. He never had to share a house with his stepfamily, though — one silver lining of having been an adult when his parents divorced and found new partners. My parents have only one friend who has been divorced, so they don’t really understand divorce, let alone what happens in second-chance relationships and blended families.

  Boyfriend’s girls don’t completely get it all, either.

  “So how is this baby going to be related to me?” one of his daughters asks.

  “He’s going to be your brother,” Boyfriend tells her. “I’m going to be his father and Rebecca is going to be his mother.”

  While I don’t worry about how Boyfriend’s daughters will take all this in — they are older and have each other and are
extremely close — I mostly worry about my own daughter, not just because she’s my biological child (although, admittedly, that’s a large part), but also because her place in our blended family will shift the most.

  Boyfriend’s children may have been affected the most by the move into our home, but my daughter will now have a full-time blood sibling, something her stepsisters have always known and she never has. Rowan is, essentially, going from being an only child to being one of four. She also went from being the only girl to one of three girls. She will no longer be the youngest of our brood, nor the eldest, either. The new baby will make her a middle child. No one wants to be the middle child. Nothing personal, middle children. But you know it’s true. I can say this because I am a middle child.

  I go out of my way to make sure she’s happy about this new baby. When I first missed my period and went out to buy a pregnancy test, Rowan came with me. I also took the test in front of my daughter. We jumped for joy when we saw those two lines. I happily obliged when she asked if she could pee on the second unused test that came in the box for fun. I figured, at age eight, I didn’t really have to be stressed that it might, unexpectedly, come back positive.

  We choose the name Holt for this new addition. The baby will be named in honour of my late grandparents. My grandfather came to Canada from Poland with the last name Burnholtz. Like many immigrants during that time, he found his last name was a determent to finding a job, so he shortened it to Burns. I wanted to honour him by bringing back his last name, and also honour my grandmother, Helen, by having the baby’s name start with an “H.” And so, Holt!

  It wasn’t my first choice of names, although I do love it. I wanted to name the baby Rocco so I would have two children sharing the first letter of my name. But Rowan, who had named one of her baby dolls Rocco, refused to let me use the name. I wanted so badly for Rowan not just to be onboard with this baby, but also to feel like she was a part of the entire pregnancy. So I let my daughter keep the name Rocco for her future child.

  The day Holt is born, everything in our house changes. So, let’s lay this all out: Boyfriend’s children gain a brother from another mother. Rowan has a brother from another mister. Boyfriend is now the biological father of three children, and I’m the biological mother of two. (I’ll give you a second to figure that one out.) Just your average, everyday modern family!

  Oddly, I almost feel sorry for Holt, for having two parents who are in love and live in the same house. As he gets older, he will realize that he’s the only one who stays put as two of his sisters go back and forth to their mother’s home, while his other sister goes off with her father for weekends or vacations. He will probably feel that his sisters get to go off and have these separate lives and all of these great adventures, while he’s stuck at home with us. When did it become normal to feel sorry for the child who has parents who are together and love each other? But it has become the norm as more and more people blend families, with so many different variations of “family.”

  “I try to be mindful of the fact that my stepson has got a more difficult situation than his brothers,” one of my friends tells me. She became a stepmom first, before she and her husband went on to have two more children of their own. “He also has a stepfather and a six-year-old brother at his mom’s house, so he’s the only one of four brothers who has to move back and forth between houses. He doesn’t complain about this, but sometimes when he is angry or upset, I think it must be related.”

  Even so, not only do we worry about our kids who have to split their time between houses and parents, we also feel bad for the ones who don’t have to split time between houses and parents. Sorry your dad and I are happily together!

  It’s. Fucked. Up.

  Holt’s sisters are enamoured with him the second he comes home from the hospital. They all want to spend as much time holding their new baby brother as possible. There is almost a decade age difference between the baby and my daughter, and a fourteen-year age difference between the baby and Boyfriend’s eldest daughter. We have to monitor and referee, down to the minute, the amount of time our children get to hold him.

  “You’ve been holding him forever! It’s my turn!” the children bicker, the only time they argue.

  “But I’ve only been holding him for seven minutes!”

  At one point, we even use an egg timer to make holding the baby equal for all his sisters. We are all blissfully happy about this baby who, because his sisters are so much older, has four mother-figures. They change his diapers. They love to give him baths. They love to dress him up and take selfies with him. He’s their doll and they love him. We love him. We all love each other!

  Everything is awesome.

  As it turns out, you don’t get a discount for having a reverse vasectomy and then another vasectomy. Trust me. I asked. Baby Holt, amusingly, shares the same birthday as the urologist who did Boyfriend’s vasectomy reversal. We learn this on the day Boyfriend goes in to get another — his second — vasectomy, a couple of months after Holt is born.

  We are idiots, of course, to think that having a baby so soon after blending households will go as smoothly as Holt’s conception did. After the novelty of having a newborn wears off, cracks in our once blissfully blended family start to appear. Like any new parents, we are beyond exhausted, and this time, we are older — read: mature — parents, so we are extra fucking tired. Not only that, but as I did after giving birth to Rowan, I am suffering from the Baby Blues, which has shown Boyfriend a new side to me, one that is overly sensitive and cries for no reason. The Baby Blues are no joke, and I’m not laughing.

  “This was your idea,” Boyfriend will throw out every time we bicker over something, mostly due to our exhaustion. When Baby Holt was born, Boyfriend had been out of practice of raising a baby for twelve years. I was out of practice with a newborn for nearly ten years.

  “I didn’t hold a gun to your head when you went to get a vasectomy reversal, did I? I didn’t put a gun to your head when you came in me, did I?” is my usual retort.

  I am not myself, and we start to quarrel for the first time in our relationship. “My heart is with you and it is you that I want to be with,” Boyfriend sends me in an email after one fight. “Getting a reverse vasectomy should prove just how much I love you and what I would do for you. Holt is getting easier, and although we never admit it, he has changed our lives and we are learning what life is like with another baby while we are raising other children.” We most certainly are. We’re just tired and snippy. This, too, shall pass.

  Boyfriend was a package deal. He didn’t just bring his girls, his clown-car of a U-Haul, and that fucking nasty chair the day he moved in. He also brought Toby, his dog. And when Holt joins our family, that dog loses his shit. Literally.

  Toby takes to shitting in Baby Holt’s bedroom, on his Superman rug, multiple times a day. The dog has become so brazen, he will literally take a crap in our newborn’s bedroom even if we are right there, changing the baby’s diaper. I am already having issues with this four-legged animal who eats underwear, the crotches of our pants, bras, hand towels, and toilet paper. He also jumps on the kitchen table and has scratched the paint on both the inside and outside of the door to our backyard. Toby shits and pees inside, not just in the Baby’s room, but in my daughter’s room as well. He was already a pain in the ass, and he has gotten exponentially worse since the baby was born. Like, he’ll look us square in the eyes, squat, and take a shit right there in the middle of our baby’s room, eerily looking at us the whole time. It’s like a “Fuck you for doing this to me, humans. Fuck. You.” A small part of me wonders if this dog is a prophet for what’s to come.

  I love animals, I really do. But I don’t like that I was forced into keeping this dog, and I’m reminded of that every time Toby acts like a dick. I yell at Boyfriend that his dog needs to be trained. We have to keep every single door in our house closed because of the dog, which pisses me off. Boyfriend promises to get a trainer, but he never follows through.


  The first time I went to Boyfriend’s house, Toby happily wagged his tail at me. Boyfriend says he “knew” I was The One because Toby never barked at me. And he barks at everyone. So I guess that automatically meant I’d love to share my house with him. When Boyfriend separated from his wife, they had a deal that the dog would go wherever the children were, essentially a custody schedule for their dog. When the children were at their mother’s, the dog would go with them. When they were staying at their father’s, the dog would go there. Then, one day, just weeks into us blending households, Boyfriend’s ex-wife announced that the dog was too much for her and said, “Either Rebecca takes him full-time or I’m going to get rid of him.”

  Thanks, ex! No pressure. What was I supposed to do, backed into a corner like that, at such a critical time in blending, when I wanted Boyfriend’s children to like me and feel at home? Boyfriend and his children love Toby. They picked that dog out of a litter. They bonded with him from the beginning. I, however, am not his greatest fan. I told Boyfriend that if I had wanted a dog, I would have already had one. After all, Rowan was seven when we started dating. What do all seven-year-old girls ask for? A dog, that’s what. Rowan had been begging for a dog for years, and I’d always said no. And didn’t we already have enough on our plate, with our three, soon-to-be four, children? But, if I was the reason those girls lost their beloved pet, I’d be the bitch who made them lose their dog. Not their mother, who gave the ultimatum. Me.

  So, I was really between a rock and a hard place. I said I’d take the dog permanently, but I had demands. “I will not be responsible for this dog,” I warned him. “I will not be expected to feed him, walk him, pick up his shit. If we go away or you have to go away for business, you’ll have to make other arrangements,” I said. “The dog will remain your and your kids’ responsibility.” I got no praise, no thank-you, no nothing after agreeing to take on the dog. And neither did Rowan, who would end up spending the most time with Toby, happily playing with him, taking him for walks, and making sure he had water in his bowl.