Holt was a real eye-opener for me. So was that conversation with my mom. I don’t think Boyfriend loves our son and his biological daughters more than he loves my daughter, but like Nana said, I’m sure it’s not the same kind of love. And now I’m wondering if that’s really that big of a deal. It’s not like there’s only one kind of love. I mean, I, too, have obviously been guilty of not loving all the children equally. I don’t take Boyfriend’s children on one-on-one holidays, like I do with my daughter. Boyfriend would never say that the love he has for our son is different than the love he has for Rowan, because he knows … better. But I’m not an idiot. If I hooked Boyfriend up to a lie detector and asked him if he loves our son and my daughter equally, with the same kind of fierce and unconditional loyalty and support, I’m pretty sure that if he said yes, the dial would fly off the spring and his pants would immediately catch on fire. Yes, he’s known Rowan longer, by virtue of the fact she existed before we even met. But if I put him up on the stand, as if he were on trial, he’d plead the fifth. He values his life. I don’t ask Boyfriend if he loves my daughter as much as he loves his biological girls. And I would hate it if he asked me the very same question. He knows what my answer would be. Because I can’t pretend.
Fuck, I was so mad at Nana. But Nana isn’t exactly wrong.
It’s not the same kind of love when they’re not your own. It’s not a lesser love. But it is a different one. It’s a kind of love that can often feel delicious, like a ripe peach. We are a family comprising people who love each other. We do. There is love among us all. Is it all the same love? Does it really matter? Is that even a realistic thing to expect? When we’re all watching a romantic comedy together, the six of us curled up on one couch, it feels like we are just another family.
But then there are the other times, when it can feel nothing short of yucky, like a nasty rotten peach you find when you excavate the fruit bin in your fridge. You know the one. It’s bruised and unrecognizable as a fruit. When Boyfriend’s girls, for example, one year forget to wish me a happy birthday, I am that peach.
The best way I can describe loving someone else’s children is like being friends with someone and suddenly you both realize your feelings toward one another are stronger than “just friends.” Often those turn out to be the best kinds of relationships. Just like in a rom-com, where two characters are best friends, but they get along so well that they never even notice the right person for them has been there all along, just waiting to be discovered. Maybe I will eventually discover that I love Boyfriend’s children as much as the two who came out of me. Likewise, maybe Boyfriend’s children will discover that yes, they love their brother, but they also love my daughter. Or me. Love is also about respect, which, in a blended family always has to be earned.
Sadly, the truth is, we’ve been doing this blended family thing for years, and our children still haven’t bonded in the way I hoped or once imagined. Rowan doesn’t seem important to Boyfriend’s children. Boyfriend’s children don’t seem all that important to Rowan. Pretty much, to tell you the honest truth, at some point we all just stopped trying to get to know each other. We’ve long since settled into never going out of our way to know what’s going on in each other’s lives. I stopped trying as hard with Boyfriend’s children. He stopped trying as hard with my daughter. When relationships stall, it’s pretty much the same as going backwards. Momentum, after all, is everything.
· SIX ·
Sometimes a picture really does say a thousand words. Boyfriend and I are lying in bed, and I catch a glimpse of his screensaver on his phone out of the corner of my eye. It’s a new photo, one that I haven’t seen before. His screensaver features three beautiful, beaming children. His two girls are wrapping their arms around Baby Holt, their brother from another mother (me!). I’m immediately agitated, because it only features Boyfriend’s biological children. Noticeably absent, especially to me, is my biological daughter, Rowan. What photograph Boyfriend chooses to use on his phone screensaver may not seem like it should be an issue at all. Maybe I am overly sensitive, or maybe I’m about to get my period, but, I admit, I’m a little stung by the photo he chose. After all, it’s a photo he sees every single time he uses his phone.
I know, rationally, that even in non-blended families, not all children are always featured on a parent’s screensaver. However, it may seem like just a photo, but when you leave one kid out when you’re in a blended family, it could potentially be the spark that ignites a battle. The Hi/Bye Fight is all the proof you need that conflicts in blended households don’t always come from a place of legitimate wrong.
This feels different, though. And so I take this screensaver photo personally, even if there’s no malice behind his choice.
“Why does your screensaver only feature your kids? What about Rowan?” I ask, also wondering, And me? At one point, I was Boyfriend’s screensaver.
“I don’t know,” Boyfriend says. “I just liked this photo.”
Am I acting like a brat? I mean, who cares? It’s just a screensaver. So why am I looking at it as if there’s some deeper meaning? Boyfriend has said he just likes the photo — it is, indeed, a nice photo — and so he probably chose it without a second thought. Or maybe he subconsciously forgot my daughter, the only one not related to him by blood. My brain has been working overtime, ever since we blended, to make sure everyone feels equal to us and to each other. So, yes, I wonder if perhaps it was a subconscious move on Boyfriend’s part to choose that one photo over one in which all the children are featured or one that featured us. Is that image trying to send a subliminal message to his children? Like, “You’re still my favourite. Don’t worry!”
I can’t help but inwardly question if he picked the picture with his biological children because they hold the most special place in his heart. If he indeed just chose it without a second thought, that means that my daughter and I weren’t first thoughts, or thoughts at all. Which stings.
Behind the closed doors of a blended family, there’s a high probability that feelings do get hurt over something as silly to the outside world as being left out of a screensaver. At this point in our relationship, the novelty of blending is fading slowly, like a piece of artwork the sun beams on, making the colours fade. Obviously. But my daughter being left out makes me feel left out on her behalf. I feel like Rowan and I are interlopers or failed a test. I hurt even more for Rowan.
As always, I call a friend to vet my level of crazy.
“I don’t think you should take it personally,” she says. “My mother-in-law asked me why I never post pictures of her son’s children on social media. So I asked her, ‘Why don’t you ask your own son why he doesn’t post pictures of them? He is their father.’ Then my mother-in-law said to me, ‘You are his wife, so that makes them yours as well.’ I pretty much hung up on her. Not my proudest moment.”
“See, you took it personally!” I shoot back. “Why can’t I?”
“Fine, yeah. I overreacted for sure. I actually de-friended her after that,” she laughs.
“You did not!” I say, because in this day and age, de-friending someone on social media is akin to, well, basically telling them to go to hell. She pretty much flipped her mother-in-law the bird over social media photographs regarding their blended family.
It’s another evening-time fight. Boyfriend and I retreat to the yard — the location where we film our fight scenes so the kids can’t hear us.
“You only have a photo of Rowan on your screensaver,” Boyfriend says to me. He’s not wrong. In fact, he’s entirely right. The screensaver on my phone features a photo of just Rowan, beaming in a red ski-racing one-piece.
“It’s been my screensaver for years, mostly because I’m too lazy to change it,” I say to Boyfriend. Yes, yes. Hypocritical for sure. But I’m leaving out three kids in a family with four.
Ever since we blended families, there has been an unspoken, but playful, war over who is featured on Boyfriend’s phone. At first, it really was entert
aining. Back before phones had fingerprint or eyeball recognition, and back when I knew Boyfriend’s password, as did his two daughters, it was sort of amusing screwing with his phone and his screensaver. At least in the early days, before jealousies and loyalties reared their ugly head. It didn’t seem so divided when I would pick up his phone while he was in the shower and playfully change his screensaver to a photo of me. The photo of me never lasted for more than a week, because Boyfriend’s children, too, were in on this game and would hack into their father’s phone to change the screensaver photo back to one of them. Honestly, it really was playful for all of us. Even Boyfriend thought it was pretty entertaining, rolling his eyes after seeing a new photo when he picked up his phone. He never knew, from one day to the next, what or who would be featured on his screensaver.
None of this was done with any malice. Boyfriend seemed to get a kick out of seeing a new photo on his phone, shaking his head over our silly antics.
But I wonder if we were all, essentially, fighting for his attention. His daughters and I were joking around, trying to put our faces front and centre. We all laughed about changing his photos until it no longer seemed like a laughing matter, especially after we had our son.
“It’s just sort of weird that you only want to show off your biological children and leave Rowan out,” I tell him. I’m not exactly mad about the fact he chose to feature only his biological children, but I’m not not mad either. Mostly, I’m annoyed and a little bit hurt. Since his phone now requires fingerprint recognition to gain access, I can no longer hack into it to change the photo.
Somewhere along the way, and I’m not exactly sure when or why it happened, we stopped sharing passwords. Sharing passwords in this day and age really is a sign of true trust and transparency in a healthy relationship. So why, as our relationship has grown, has our access to each other’s digital worlds shrunk?
“I would change it to a photo of all the kiddos, but I don’t have a photo of all of them,” Boyfriend says. This is not altogether true. Just months after our son was born, I hired a professional photographer to take group shots of all four children together, each child on their own, and each child holding their new baby brother. The shoot took hours, as if we were posing for a Calvin Klein spread for Vogue, but the results were fantastic. I spent a small fortune to blow up one of the photos on a large canvas that hangs in our kitchen, the three girls surrounding the baby. It’s the first thing everyone sees when they walk into the kitchen. Here we are! Our four beautiful and happy children!
The massive canvas of all our children not only shows that there are four children in our blended family, but, also that Boyfriend and I are proud parents — just like any other family — eager to show off our offspring to anyone who visits.
In our television room, there’s another photo of just the girls hanging on the wall, before we had Holt, taken when we first blended and we all took a vacation to Jamaica together. When I look at that photo, Boyfriend’s children and my daughter look like true sisters, smiling in another blissful blended family moment, even if they look nothing alike.
We have just one or two photos of the six of us. One was taken when our son was two, which was featured in a magazine, to go along with a story on blended families. Looking back at the answers I gave the magazine, I can see why people don’t understand what really happens in a blended family. Because anyone who has been interviewed about blended families, including me, avoids admitting to the outside world (but maybe to ourselves, also) the real truth. It took six weeks for all of our schedules to match so we could do this photo shoot, for one.
When asked by the interviewer to explain the bonuses of being blended, I answered, “I do call them ‘bonus children,’ because they are a bonus! … I actually love the mayhem that comes along with it, though it took some getting used to. When I hear all of them getting along and laughing, I almost want to cry. It’s so nice to see and hear!” I said at the time, when interviewed for the magazine, called InBetween. “It feels more like I’m living with fun roommates. One of his daughters will do my hair. The other will do my makeup. And both of them will give Rowan advice on friendships or other things.”
Holy shit, how much fun did I make my life and blending sound? Everyone is going to want to run out, get divorced, and remarry with a partner who has kids. Join the fun, people. Blending is where it’s at! But, alas, looking back, I can see that my answers were bullshit, as if I were trying to convince myself that all was perfect.
First off, I really don’t “love” the mayhem that comes along with it and, no, I’ve never gotten used to it. Sure, yes, when I hear all of the kids getting along and laughing, it does warm my heart. And maybe once or twice his daughters have been my glam squad, but it isn’t a regular occurrence, as I made it seem. Maybe a couple of times they’ve given my daughter advice on friendships and life shit, but that too isn’t a regular occurrence. So, yes, anyone who read that article would think I am having the time of my life blending, even though, in reality, we have started to argue over everything.
I do feel guilty for leading people, or at least the magazine readers, to believe that blending is the Best Thing Ever because I wanted the outside world to think that all was good and that my life was … maybe not perfect, but almost perfect. Not only did I think that people didn’t want to hear the truth, but I probably didn’t want to face it, let alone have strangers know my truth.
Also, if you look closely, as I do often, at this photograph, you can see that we are divided, even if we are all in the same picture. Boyfriend and I are in the middle with Baby Holt on his lap. On my left is Rowan. On Boyfriend’s right side are his two children. It wasn’t the photographer who had us pose like that. But when the photographer asked us to “squeeze in tighter,” Rowan immediately nuzzled up to me and Boyfriend’s girls squeezed in with him. It happened as if we were all on autopilot, obeying an unspoken rule of loyalties. Still, it’s a nice photo, one that I will cherish because it features all of us.
When it comes to other photographs, it’s also clear that loyalties are and have always been divided. In my daughter’s bedroom, there are framed photographs of her and me, many of her with her father, and many more of her and her friends. There are no photographs of Boyfriend or his two children, but there is one of her holding her baby brother shortly after he was born. In the room Boyfriend’s girls share, they have put up numerous adorable photographs of themselves when they were just toddlers — a time before I entered their lives, when their parents were still together, before they had a brother from another mother, before they lived part-time with my daughter. Basically, all the moments featured are from before we blended.
“I give up,” Boyfriend says, after I continue to pester him over his choice of screensaver photo. I’ve gone off on tangents about how I don’t feel I’m a priority. The screensaver is a trigger for all the other times I’ve felt left out.
Boyfriend changes his screensaver to a photograph of a beautiful, peaceful sandy white beach, effectively ending the screensaver jealousy feud forever. A beach, after all, is neutral, like a sunset. Not one of us can get upset over a screensaver of a beach, right?
The beach is not just a stock photo, though. I have bought a condo in Mexico, for all of us, in hopes that we will have many happy family vacations together for years to come. It was a large investment, for sure, but one that I also hope will yield great returns by way of making unforgettable memories, getting our children to bond, and providing a place for Boyfriend and me to end up in our old age.
Even though I alone paid for it, I truly did buy it for our entire blended family. Boyfriend takes care of the renters, who help pay for the condo fees. Boyfriend and I sometimes vacation there, without the children, too. When we do, we go for massages and then have sex on the table afterwards. On these vacations, we reconnect and go for walks on the beach, holding hands. We are still very much in love … when we are in Mexico. But once our vacation ends, we are right back to reality and blended
-family bullshit.
Now I own two places that Boyfriend doesn’t chip in for, at least not equally. I’m the queen of two castles, and as I said, you can never be the king or queen of someone else’s castle. I’m starting to think that his money woes are no longer situational, which makes me feel like he simply assumes that I have the money to take care of two homes. It’s this assumption that pisses me off, because I don’t think Boyfriend quite understands that I worked very hard to be able to buy the Mexico pad, paid for in cash. It also makes me feel like he has no respect for my career, which has helped buy this place in Mexico and keep up with the bills at home. Yes, he pays half the bills, aside from the cable and internet. Yes, he pays for half of the nanny, and he pays for the groceries and household supplies. But that’s about it. Just the thought that he doesn’t respect how hard I work, and that he expects I’ll just take care of the big-ticket items — property taxes, condo fees, the gardener — starts to grate on me.
I hate to admit it, but I detest that he simply assumes that these places are his just as much as they are mine. It feels — to me, anyway — as if he’s starting to act entitled. He likes the idea that we have a place in Mexico. He likes the fact we live in a fancy area. He likes to drive the motorcycle I bought him for his birthday one year. It gets to the point, sometimes, when we’re arguing over who paid for what, that I want to say, “It’s not yours unless I tell you it’s yours!” much like telling a kid not to touch someone else’s toys unless they ask first. When you start to feel that things are unbalanced, you forget that daycare motto: Sharing is caring.
Blissfully Blended Bullshit Page 8
