Blissfully Blended Bullshit

by Rebecca Eckler

  I don’t hold my breath waiting for a hearty congratulations. She seems as interested in seeing the house and in my pregnancy as a child in the back seat of the car on the twentieth hour of a road trip. Disapproval seeps through the phone. Or maybe it’s not disapproval. Maybe it’s just a total lack of fucks. Either way, I’m not expecting her to show up with a bottle of wine for us to share any time soon. There will be no future scenes of us leaning over my kitchen counter, laughing about Boyfriend’s quirks.

  I find it slightly bizarre she seems to have no inclination to take me up on my invitation to see where her girls will be living part-time. I kind of admire her for not seeming to care. But I’m equally baffled and dumbfounded. If she’s looking to hurt me, her weapon is indifference.

  If my ex invited me to meet a serious girlfriend, one who was going to move in with him and who would be a big part of my daughter’s life, there’s no way I’d turn down the invitation. I’m way too curious. Why wouldn’t Boyfriend’s ex-wife want to visit so she could have the opportunity to size me up and judge me? Doesn’t she have any feelings about the changes that her children are going through? If she does, she doesn’t share them with me.

  “When we first blended,” a friend tells me, “we constantly argued about the amount of phone calls his ex made to him daily.” I hear this a lot. So maybe I should be relieved, if anything, about her indifference.

  “Well, the invitation is always open,” I say when it’s clear the call is going nowhere, and like that, the call is over. I’m pretty sure she pressed “end” before I said “bye.” Whatever. I did the best I could. I followed my lawyer’s advice. I was attempting to be the Bigger Person.

  “The truest thing about blended families is that saying, ‘You’re marrying the ex,’ ” my girlfriend tells me over the phone after I relay the mostly one-sided conversation I had with Boyfriend’s ex. “I realized very early on that if I was going to have a happy, easy family life, I was going to have to find a way to get her to trust me. I wouldn’t say we’re best friends now, but we are friendly and respectful. It’s been hugely helpful in opening up lines of communication after what was a very painful divorce for both my husband and his ex.”

  At least I can say I tried, right? Maybe she’ll like me someday. Today, though, is not that day.

  If nothing else came out of that call, one very valuable lesson did: do not tell Boyfriend’s children anything that I don’t want their mother to know.

  While Boyfriend didn’t exactly offer to chip in with some sort of rent or buy out my ex’s half of the house before moving in, I haven’t said anything about it either. I’m still wrapping my head around what we are going to do with five couches and nine televisions, where the fuck he’ll store his clothes, and where the hell I’m going to hide his poker table so it’s not in the kitchen.

  I assume he’ll start offering to share the gas bills, the hydro bills, and the cable and internet bills and contribute in some sort of monetary way now that we’re living together. But I’m not the only one, thank gawd, who didn’t discuss money before blending households, which will later come back to bite both Boyfriend and me in the ass. I know I sound totally irresponsible, but I’m not the only one I know who avoided this topic like the plague before blending.

  “We didn’t discuss too much about money when we got married,” admits one of my friends. She has three children and her partner has two children, and they all moved into her house. “We knew we were going to be living in my house, as it was much bigger than his.” Like me, she admits she “probably” should have had more conversations. “But I definitely was upfront about my expectations. For example, a nanny and a housekeeper and getting away a couple of times a year is not considered a luxury to me, but a necessity. There was some culture shock, as he came from a more modest background,” she says to me.

  Boyfriend, too, comes from a more modest life, which I really believe is situational, as he led me to believe it was. He spent thousands of dollars to furnish an entire house after he moved out. Plus, his contentious divorce is still ongoing, so he and his bank account have taken a huge financial hit dealing with lawyers and court dates and what he perceives as an unreasonable ex. Besides, Boyfriend makes a pretty good case that if I moved in with him and I couldn’t afford to live where he lived, he wouldn’t make me pay any rent. I completely believe him. For richer or for poorer, right?

  Like my friend’s husband, Boyfriend really can’t afford to live in my area. The property taxes alone, which I pay for, are outrageous. I need a weekly gardener, for example, because, while my house is not huge, the property is. I also have a nanny, another cost that is new to him. Should he start chipping in for the nanny, who takes care of Rowan but now will be making dinners for Boyfriend, as well as his daughters when they stay with us, and doing their laundry and cleaning up their messes around the house?

  And, like my friend, travelling for me is a necessity, not a luxury, unlike for Boyfriend and his children. The truth is, I really have no idea what he earns, and I don’t ask, and he doesn’t share it with me. (I assume Boyfriend’s ego won’t allow him to tell me.) I know he has a job, which I can’t describe, with employees. I know he makes money. But his lawyer bills are growing as quickly as weeds and putting him into debt. But don’t all couples, blended or not, have to negotiate money and contributions based on their individual situations? We’re not that unique.

  “Ugh. I hear you. I think the biggest blended family money argument we’ve had was over paying for the lawyer’s fees when he went to court with his ex-wife over their son’s schooling,” a friend tells me much later about her husband. “His ex-wife wanted their son to go private — her parents were paying the fees — and my husband, who is a deeply principled social democrat, went to court to try to put him in the state system. He ended up spending a year’s worth of private school fees trying to keep his son out of private school — and lost! From then on, I told him if he wanted to take his ex-wife to court, he could defend himself. I don’t want our household income being spent on court battles.”

  And neither do I. So I loan Boyfriend $20,000 to help him pay off his lawyer’s fees, which will also later bring up a lot of resentment on my part. But not yet.

  I truly believe Boyfriend. If my daughter and I had moved into his house, he wouldn’t ask me to pay for anything. I truly believe that if I were the one who needed money for my lawyer’s bills, he would help me if he could. Why wouldn’t I believe him? We’re in love! Love is blind. Love also makes us completely foolish. But, again, like my girlfriend, I think of Boyfriend moving in as a small investment that will yield a lot of interest, just in other ways that don’t have anything to do with money directly. He could help with driving my daughter to school and her activities. He could take over the snow shovelling. He could make dinners, since he enjoys cooking and I enjoy eating. I expect this particular bonus to pay off with dividends, especially now that I’m pregnant with his child.

  This baby, after all, will free us from all potential conflicts about “mine” and “his” because we are going to share a human, so who cares, at this moment, who is going to pay for what or what is fair? Mostly, I give Boyfriend a free pass on chipping in with the mortgage, because talking about money is such a downer and I’m sure we’ll just figure it out later, as we go along, as we have done throughout our entire relationship. Contrary to what experts say about planning and discussing money matters before blending households — Create a dual budget! Joint accounts or separate accounts? Will you make all future financial decisions together? — having no plans in place actually works for us. We had no plans to date, for example, and look at us now!

  I also just feel kind of guilty, to be honest, that his life and his children’s lives are changing far more drastically than mine and my daughter’s. Boyfriend now has to drop off and pick up his two children numerous times a week at their mother’s house, outside the city. This means that Boyfriend will spend hours in his car, including having to get
out of the house at 6 a.m. on school days, because they go to school near their mother’s house. It’s no picnic for him. His old back problems flare up from sitting in a car for so many hours every week.

  I may have given up my closet space and opened my doors, but he’s given up a lot, too, by moving into my house. So have his girls. They now not only have to share a room when they stay with us, unlike at their mother’s home, where they each have their own room, and unlike my daughter, who has her own room, but they also don’t have any friends in this new neighbourhood they’ll be living in part-time. Plus, they have to wrap their heads around the fact that their own father will be seeing my daughter and me every day, and they now have another sister. And they’ll soon have the sibling currently baking in my belly. It’s a lot of change for me. But it’s a lot of change for everyone. The one room that remains the same is my daughter’s bedroom, but that doesn’t mean she, too, isn’t affected by Boyfriend moving in.

  “Don’t you remember, Mommy?” my daughter asks me, years later, when I ask her if she remembers how she felt when Boyfriend moved in. “You bought one of those pill cases that have the days on them, the ones old people use to organize their medicine every day? You would put brown M&M’s in the days that I still got to sleep with you and red M&M’s in the days I couldn’t sleep with you, so I knew what days I could still sleep with you.”

  Kids remember things like their fourth-favourite reptile, but also when they realized they could no longer sleep with you every night because the bed you shared would now be occupied by someone else, someone Mommy loves, too.

  For years, my daughter and I have slept together, so the biggest change for her is not being able to sleep with me every night. Boyfriend will learn immediately after he moves in that I still will want to sleep with my daughter, now climbing into her bed, instead of her sleeping in what was just my bed, a couple of times a week, on brown M&M days. Boyfriend knows my daughter and I are super tight thanks to living together, just us two, for years. I don’t waver on this, even though Boyfriend thinks she’s way too old to still be sleeping with me. I tell him that she doesn’t have to sleep with me — she goes on sleepovers and to overnight camp — but that we both like to sleep together.

  “It’s not like she’s going to still want to sleep with me when she’s eighteen,” I tell Boyfriend. “Plus, it’s just a couple times a week.” Without realizing it, in a way, I choose my daughter over him, right from the start.

  Change is scary. What’s even scarier is regret, and I don’t want to regret him moving in or for my daughter to regret my decision for us to live together, so, yes, I continue to sleep with my daughter a couple of times a week. I cherish brown M&M days. Even if Boyfriend doesn’t get it.

  Money talk? Whatever. Sleeping with my daughter, occasionally, after Boyfriend moves in? Whatever. What can I say? Being pregnant kind of stops every cognitive function, other than joy.

  It takes eight hours to unload all of Boyfriend’s stuff. It takes us three weeks to unpack and find room for all of it. But, now, finally, it’s done. Our — OMG, our — house is now an eclectic mixture of my modern furnishings mashed in with his bachelor-pad furnishings. I’d describe the new decor as “flea market.” The only other room, aside from my daughter’s bedroom, that looks mostly like its previous self is my master bedroom. The rest of my house has very, very visibly become ours. I’m so deeply in love with Boyfriend that I don’t even fight about the fugly leather chair. I let him keep it. This is what happens, I assume, when you first blend households. You compromise. He hates my fabulous modern but totally uncomfortable couch. I hate that fucking leather chair. I’m adamant the couch stays. He’s adamant the chair stays. So we all win! And lose.

  Bonus Children’s beds and dressers are now in the large finished basement. I wonder if they think it is unfair that Rowan gets to keep her solitary space. But Bonus Children also have a steam shower down there, which is nicer than the washroom Boyfriend and I will share. I call it a wash. We are now all living together in one quasi-organized household. The U-Haul has long since left the driveway, the useless bottle of Ativan has been tucked safely away, and my heart rate has returned to normal. Everything is blissful and wonderful, and we are finally one big, happy blended family. Everything feels perfect.

  The baby, too, baking in my belly will also essentially bond not just Boyfriend and me together for infinity, but our children as well. We really are for better or for blended. Meanwhile, the cohabitation agreement is still in my purse, not touched and not signed. Stupid, glorious love!

  · THREE ·

  Boyfriend’s reverse vasectomy cost $5,000. I paid for it with a credit card. Even I was surprised when I saw the word “Approved” light up on the machine. This is, by far, the strangest and largest “item” that I’ve paid for with a credit card.

  Baby Holt joins our blended family a few months after we all start to settle in. He is the blessing that we decided to add to the mix pretty much right away, because of course we couldn’t wait to solidify our family bond with a relationship we all share.

  The beginning of my relationship with Boyfriend coincided with my uterus crying out and my ovaries being all, “We’re still here, doing our thing. Just saying!” I would pass pregnant women on the street and think, “Need another. Need another.” I was like a feral cat, and whenever Boyfriend would cum in me, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. I knew there was no way I was going to get pregnant. He’d had a vasectomy after his second child and was sure he was done.

  But then we met and fell in love. Maybe we were lured into a false sense of security. Whatever the reason, Boyfriend and I, in our infinite wisdom, thought, Hey, you know what we need? A baby!

  It was really my genius idea. I blame the weeping ovaries. Things could only get better with the addition of another character in our sitcom, right? The more the merrier! Rowan exits the scene from time to time to visit her dad. Boyfriend’s girls are with their mother half of the time. But Baby Holt? He would be the constant. Holt wouldn’t leave. Holt wouldn’t have other people. Boyfriend and I would be it. Holt would be the one and only entity in the walls of the house that was both of ours equally.

  Yes, having a baby was my idea. In fact, when Boyfriend and I were falling in love — the sweet spot of any relationship — I gave him an ultimatum. After only about three months of dating, I told him that I wanted another baby and that I would be having another baby, with or without him. I remember when I told him, early one morning, after he slept over. The kids were with their other parents, so we were alone, and I think I startled him with the idea of having a baby. I thought two things. First, I thought he’d spew out the coffee I had made him. Second, I didn’t think I’d ever see him again. I truly didn’t. Yet even after I told him what I wanted and gave him, for lack of a better word, a “deadline,” he didn’t immediately race out of my house, making up an excuse to leave as quickly as humanly possible. He finished his coffee and went to work. I don’t even remember him saying, “I’ll think about it,” but he must have said something.

  Still, I bit my lip the entire day, wondering if I’d ever hear from him again, let alone see him. But he did call again. He didn’t ghost me. We were still dating exclusively. As I had told him, I wouldn’t bring it up, and I didn’t, somehow finding the strength and willpower to not ask him if he’d thought about it. His answer, I knew, would be up to him, and he knew what I wanted.

  “I’ll give you nine months to think about it,” I’d said. “And I promise to not bring it up again until you make a decision either way.” And I didn’t, not once mentioning, “So … about that baby?”

  I don’t like using the word “ultimatum” because it sounds threatening or like some pushy demand and makes me seem like a batshit wacko. It wasn’t like that at all. I was just stating the facts. And the fact was, I wanted another baby, and, therefore, I should be dating someone who would be open to having a child with me. There’s nothing wrong with a girl who knows what she wants
. Many women are having children on their own. Why couldn’t I? I was upfront and honest about what I wanted. I didn’t want to waste my time on the wrong person for what I wanted for my future. What is it the young people say? There’s no shame to my game.

  But it’s not just women who are giving their men an ultimatum to have another baby, when it comes to blending families. These days, it’s also men.

  One of my friends who blended and already had three biological children married a very nice man with two children, so between them, they had five children. Even though my friend swore she would never have another baby ever again, she was on the receiving end of someone peppering her with baby talk. Her husband was the one pressing my friend to have a child with him, and he was even more adamant about it than me, or at least equally as adamant.

  “From the start, he wanted to have a son together. How did he know it would be a son? Anyway, I was adamantly against it, to the extent that I had a calendar reminder for myself to send a weekly text to him begging him to have a vasectomy,” she tells me when I ask why, or what, changed her mind. “He’d always say to me, ‘No, I’m not going in for that appointment, because I still think you will give me a son. As soon as you do, I will.’”

  She tells me that her husband would bring up having another baby every six months or so, and she kept saying no.

  “My husband is an amazing father, like one in a billion, and for years I wanted to do it for him, but I kept saying I couldn’t do it unless I wanted it too.”

  So what eventually changed her mind? Well, first, she came with demands and negotiated. “Things were more calm,” she tells me. “I said, ‘Let’s try,’ provided we had a baby nurse until the baby slept through the night. And I guess I liked the idea of creating a baby with someone I love so much.” So, with the promise of a night nurse, and because she loved him and knew he wanted a baby, and because it seemed like all the kids had settled into their blended lives, she folded. She, too, was lured in by a sense of security. It took two years to convince her, but they now have six children between the two of them.