Blissfully Blended Bullshit

by Rebecca Eckler

  Old habits die hard when you blend. I refuse to even entertain the idea of not going on these annual trips. Never once do Bonus Children seem to be unhappy about this. Never once do they say anything except, “Have a good time.” I’ll never really know if they feel jealousy or anger that I only take my bio daughter on these trips. But that doesn’t mean I forget about Boyfriend’s children when Rowan and I take off. It’s kind of impossible to do so, especially when people I just meet ask, “How many children do you have?” which, when you’re in a blended family, isn’t as straightforward a question as you may think. In fact, it makes you seem like a complete moron.

  I’m sitting on the balcony of our hotel room in Miami. My daughter — the epicentre of our family unit, me and my girl — is inside ordering room service for us. It’s October and her birthday weekend. Our four-day vacation is how we celebrate her birthday; we’ve done so since she was three years old, long before I met Boyfriend and his children and we blended houses, and even after having Baby Holt. It’s not that Boyfriend doesn’t understand the importance of having one-on-one time with our own biological children, but when Rowan and I took off for our first mother-daughter trip after we had blended families, he didn’t quite understand why everyone couldn’t come along, or at least why he was quite clearly not invited.

  First, there’s the issue of money. Rowan and I are blessed to be able to take these vacations. We both know that we are fortunate enough that these trips are both a luxury and a necessity for me. Boyfriend’s children have gone on vacations before, when their parents were still together, but, unlike Rowan, who travels all the time, mostly with her father, they weren’t given the opportunity often. When those vacations took place, their parents had to plan in advance. Tropical vacations are an extravagance for his children.

  Also, I’m not sure if Boyfriend is jealous of being left behind and left out of our mother-daughter vacation, or if he’s just jealous that we are someplace warm with a beach, staying in a fancy hotel. I don’t bother trying to pretend that I care his feelings are hurt, because he’s somewhat judgmental about our trips and, even after years, still can’t seem to grasp the situation. Make no mistake, Boyfriend isn’t angry about the annual ritual. He honestly doesn’t understand how, after we’ve blended families and had a baby together, I can still do this, leaving everyone else in our family out while Rowan and I take off.

  “How would you feel if I just planned a trip with my kids and didn’t invite you and Rowan?” he asks me once, after I’ve planned our mother-daughter trip without telling him. It is kind of a dick move, to book plane tickets and reserve a hotel room without asking or telling him first. I think. But I lived independently for so long before meeting Boyfriend that I am just used to doing things without having to ask for anyone’s permission.

  “In normal families,” he tells me on more than one occasion, “we’d discuss if we had the money to go away. That’s what me and my ex did. And everyone would be included. And you wouldn’t just take off somewhere without letting me know first.”

  I don’t know how to answer Boyfriend’s question on how I would feel if he planned a trip with his kids and didn’t invite me or my daughter. On the one hand, yes, I would feel like shit if he booked a trip with only his biological daughters, told me about it only afterwards, and then told me I wasn’t invited and neither was my daughter. On the other hand, I think it would be good for them to have some alone time for a longer stretch than forty-eight hours. So, I really don’t know how I’d feel. If I’m being honest, I don’t think I’d mind if he wanted to go away with just his bio children. The truth is, he doesn’t have the money or job flexibility to take off whenever, like I can, so it’s a moot point.

  “We’ve been doing this forever on her birthday. It’s just our thing,” I tell Boyfriend, who is big on avoiding exclusion, at least in the beginning and middle of our relationship, but not so much as the years go by. In theory, I am against exclusion too. In practice, though, there’s no fucking way I’m not going to go on our traditional birthday getaways.

  But after blending, it’s hard not to forget, even on our mother-daughter vacations, that there are other children in my life now, especially when people ask, “How many children do you have?”

  Rowan and I decide to take a yoga class together at the hotel, and a friendly older woman asks where we’re from as we’re setting up our mats. I answer and add, “We’re on a mother-daughter vacation.” This woman loves the idea of a mother-daughter vacation and fawns over my daughter, by far the youngest person in the class, who she says reminds her of her granddaughter. As we stretch, the woman asks if Rowan is my only child. When I don’t answer her immediately, she looks at me with the same confused expression I must have when I look at my daughter’s math homework, which I stopped understanding after grade two. People in non-blended families obviously know how many kids they have. All my married friends with children can easily answer this question, without hesitation.

  But in a blended family, this question is far more complicated to answer. You’d think I’d have the answer knocked by now — a quippy one-liner — but my answer changes depending on the situation, how I’m feeling at that particular moment, who is asking the question, and who is around.

  I never forget about Boyfriend’s children, of course, but am I even allowed to say they are my children when they are really Boyfriend and his ex-wife’s children? Would Rowan jump in, saying that her mommy has only two children, her and her brother?

  “I have a son, too,” I tell the friendly woman, giving my daughter the look that says, Shhhh! “But he’s still a baby. He’s at home with my husband,” I say.

  That last bit’s also a white lie, because even though Boyfriend has proposed and I am now his fiancée, we haven’t actually gotten married. We did talk about getting married or eloping at one point, but we couldn’t figure out how to pull it off, because we want the kids to be there. Certainly I’m not going to get married without my daughter being my maid of honour. Certainly Boyfriend wants his children there. But then Boyfriend and I thought that our parents would be offended if we eloped and just took the kids. Plus, Boyfriend’s parents are split up, which means not only would my parents need to be invited, but so would two sets of parents from his side. But then Boyfriend said he’d feel bad leaving his sister out, which means I would have to invite my three brothers. Suddenly eloping, getting married barefoot on a beach, seemed more trouble than it was worth. There are way too many people whose feelings would get hurt if we eloped, just the two of us.

  In traditional marriages, where there are no children involved yet, eloping is easy. But when you already have kids, you, of course, want them to be a part of the wedding, because you’re not just marrying each other, you’re marrying their children as well. So we stop talking about our wedding altogether, content with our common-law status — marriage now just another thing to add to our never-to-get-done to-do list.

  “Aw,” the lady in the yoga studio responds after I tell her about my son. “That’s so nice. A girl and a boy! You have a million-dollar family.”

  Sigh. Lady has no clue!

  Thankfully, class is about to start, so I don’t have the chance to explain that Daddy at home is not my daughter’s real daddy, nor is he actually my husband, let alone mention Bonus Children. But the class is a bit wrecked for me. The moment that I let out that I only have a son back at home may have passed, but I feel incredibly guilty, visualizing Bonus Daughters’ faces with what-the-fuck expressions.

  The rest of my family is not out of sight, out of mind, even on these mother-daughter vacations. I miss Boyfriend on these trips, and we talk throughout the day and every evening before bed. And, yes, we are still sending each other cheesy poems, although they are fewer and farther between. I also think about his children and always buy them some sort of souvenir. But that doesn’t mean I am any more capable of answering the simple question, “How many children do you have?” No matter how I answer, it doesn’t see
m quite right, sort of like seeing a very slightly, but most definitely, slanted painting hanging in your house. No one else may notice, but you do.

  Yes, I gave birth to two children, so I have two biological children. But Boyfriend is the biological father of three children. We are a family of six. Even the math sounds wrong. It’s … weird. But it seems inaccurate (and a bit of a fabrication) to say that I have four children, especially when people respond with, “Wow. That’s a lot of kids. You look fantastic for having four children,” as I lie by the pool. And because Boyfriend had children earlier than I, when I do include Boyfriend’s children in my answer and say, “My eldest is sixteen,” people tell me I look “so young” for having a sixteen-year-old. I always feel like I should fess up. Of course I look fucking fantastic. I only gave birth to two children, almost ten years apart, not four children. Of course I look young for having a sixteen-year-old. I didn’t give birth to her!

  But it also feels wrong to say, “I have two children,” because although I may not be related to Boyfriend’s daughters by blood, they do live with us half the time. I am watching them grow up alongside my biological children, in my house. I suppose I could answer, “I have two children and two bonus children,” but many people don’t know what a “bonus” child is, and I still would have to end up explaining, again, about the makeup of our modern family and how we came to be.

  Plus, many people don’t understand what a blended family is, and often I see, or think I see, looks of judgment after I do explain it, as if I’m the only woman in the world who — gasp! — separated, and then nine years later — nine years later — had a baby with a different man. I don’t think Boyfriend faces this kind of judgment for having children with different women. It must be nice to be a man in this situation. I also now wonder how Boyfriend answers the question of how many children he has. I make a mental note to ask him later. But, of course, I forget.

  For other people, my having kids with different fathers is compelling. I’m fascinated by their fascination. People seem to like to think I’ve fucked up my life — which is bullshit — because I’m on my second marriage and have children with two different dads, perhaps so they’ll feel better that their own relationship has lasted, even if they are unhappily married. Sometimes I think I get actual looks of pity. That, or they put me on some sort of weird pedestal, like, “Wow! You must live such an interesting life. You go, girl!” People seem to want to know where I went wrong, or where I went right.

  No matter how I answer — I have two children! I have four children! — neither answer makes me feel completely at ease. Being in a blended family makes you feel fucking clueless, incapable of answering what is, really, a fucking simple question, like, “What do you do for a living?” I also wonder how my daughter or Boyfriend’s children answer the same question. Does my daughter say she has three siblings, or just one? Do Boyfriend’s children say they have three siblings, or two?

  Although I may not know how to answer the question outside the home, inside our household I have tried to instill, and pound into our children’s brains, that they don’t have a half-brother, they just have a brother. They are not stepsisters. They are sisters. The only steps in my house, I like to say, are the stairs. I’m not forcing them to love each other, even though that’s what I hope for. I just think that using the words “half” and “step” is so outdated. Sure, you could say that I’m Bonus Daughters’ stepmother, but really, I’m just another female adult, more like a friend than I ever am a parent. Even calling myself a step-parent makes me feel like a bit of a liar, since I’ve never “parented” them. Sure, I keep them alive under my watch and sometimes help with their homework, but mostly, yeah, we just gossip about their lives and their friends.

  Even though I feel like a nitwit for not knowing how to answer the question of how many children I have, I am not the only one who finds herself somewhat bewildered when asked questions about blended families. One friend who is in a blended family, and also grew up in a blended family, says her biggest pet peeve while growing up was what to call her stepfather.

  “We weren’t going to call him ‘Dad,’ so we called him by his first name. It was hard to explain to people who he was. I hated saying ‘stepdad’ or ‘stepfather,’ because of the negative connotation around that word. Step-parents are always portrayed as evil, and he really was not at all. It was also hard to buy a Father’s Day card because I didn’t want one that said ‘Dad.’” So, yes, when you’re a child in a blended family, you are also faced with other questions that are hard to answer. “He wasn’t my dad, but since I hated the word ‘stepdad’, I didn’t know how to answer when friends would ask me if that’s my father when they saw us together. It always made me uncomfortable, especially if he was near me,” my friend shares. “He was a great father, even though he, technically, wasn’t my father.”

  Never in a gazillion years would I have imagined that such a straightforward question of how to refer to others in our blended household would bring on so much confusion. Are the children just as confused? Most of the time, I say I have four children, mainly because I feel less of a liar. And, of course, I do like hearing how fantastic and young I look for having so many children. Who wouldn’t?

  The yoga teacher ends the class quoting the Buddha in a soft voice: “What you think, you become. What you feel, you attract. What you imagine, you create.” I find her words calming. Who wants to go up against the wise words of the Buddha? Does this mean that if I think I have four children, then I will be the mother of four children? If I feel I have four children, I do have four children? If I imagine that all the children came out of me, does that mean I really can say I have four children, without feeling like I’m deceiving others? After class, as we walk back to our hotel room, I can’t help but wonder if the Buddha would have changed his tune if he’d had to live in a blended family. Just asking.

  Organizing travel for a family is a pain in the ass at the best of times. Travelling with an entire blended family is a whole different ballgame. First, Boyfriend and I have to make sure that our exes agree we can have the children on the same week so we can take all of them away to our place in Mexico at the same time. That’s the first hurdle.

  Then I need to get a travel consent letter from my daughter’s father. Boyfriend needs to get a travel letter from his ex. Boyfriend pays for his plane ticket and his two daughters’ tickets. I pay for my ticket and my daughter’s ticket. And we both share Baby Holt’s fare. It’s harder, of course, on Boyfriend, because while I only have to pay for two and a half tickets, Boyfriend has to pay for three and a half. This seems fair to me. It’s not that I haven’t spent money on Bonus Children, with gifts or cash or cheques on special occasions, or even not-special occasions when we find ourselves shopping. But when it comes to the larger ticket items for his children, like plane fares or class trips to Ecuador, I leave it to Boyfriend and his ex-wife to come up with the money for their children, just as when it comes to big-ticket expenses for my daughter, her father and I take care of her.

  Boyfriend doesn’t have the same freedom I have to travel — I can work remotely, while he has to run his business — so I take many, many mini-vacations, either alone or with my daughter, as I did before we all blended. It especially irks Boyfriend, over the years, when I travel alone, especially when I just tell him, “I need to go away,” and add, “I booked a ticket.” But why should I change everything about my pre-blended life? Travelling is a huge part of my life. Maybe it’s not “normal,” but for me it has always been the norm.

  But travelling with a blended family doesn’t just come with logical and financial issues. Like the Hi/Bye Fight, travelling can lead to some pretty nonsensical arguments. Beyond absurd!

  After one March break, one of my male friends, who has two biological children and is married to a gorgeous woman who is child-free, tells me that whenever they travel, the bullshit-of-all-bullshit argument arises between him and his wife. Trust me, it’s even sillier than the Hi/Bye Fi
ght, an example proving reality is stranger than fiction. The cause of their fight is probably the stupidest one I have ever heard, yet at the same time I don’t judge how someone feels within a blended family, because it is hard, especially if you don’t have children but have married or are dating someone who has. And, yes, it does make me feel better, since I thought I was the only one who had to deal with the bullshit fights that pop up in my blended family.

  “There’s always a fight over seating arrangements on the airplane,” he tells me. “Always! My kids want to sit with me, so I get three seats and sit in an aisle next to my wife on an aisle across. That makes her feel left out and not part of the crew.” My head spins when he goes on to say, “The alternative would be two on each side, but then I am far from one of my kids and they hate that.”

  So before my friend, his kids, and his wife even arrive at their tropical destination, the bullshit of blending while travelling rears its ugly head. Listen, I’m the first to know what it’s like to feel left out and “not part of the crew” in certain situations, like when all his kids are on the couch with Boyfriend and there’s no room left for me, literally and figuratively, but I’m certainly not going to whine, “Where am I supposed to sit? On the hardwood floor?” It’s these little issues — like feeling you’re left out because you want to sit with your husband but can’t because the kiddos want to sit with their father — that sting and lead to feuds.

  “Now that is a crazy stupid fight,” I say to him, trying to contain my laugh. On the other hand, of course, I can’t believe his wife would care about where she sits on a less-than-four-hour plane ride. In fact, I think that in most traditional families, at least one parent would love to not sit with their kids on a plane ride. They’d love the break, just to be able to sit alone, reading a trashy magazine, instead of catering to their kids for hours in the air.