Blissfully Blended Bullshit

by Rebecca Eckler

  I almost want to take a screenshot of these comments and text them to Boyfriend to say, “Look, I’m not the only one who feels this way!” because often he doesn’t understand why I feel snubbed and rejected. But I know it will be fruitless (as will my fruit bowl). Boyfriend will just argue that it’s not true that he leaves us to starve when his children are with their mother. Okay, “starve” may be too strong a word. But I want to say to him, “Look inside the fridge! Do you notice it’s bare?” And then, when his kids are around, I also want to say to him, “Now look at it! Do you notice the difference?”

  “Why is it you only do a good grocery shop when your kids are here?” I ask Boyfriend out of the blue one night.

  I’m surprised by his response. I may sound accusatory, but he is overly defensive, as if I’m accusing him of sleeping with one of my close girlfriends, not just asking him about his grocery schedule.

  “Do you know how hard it is to shop for six people who all like different things? Do you know how expensive groceries are?” he asks. I can’t help but scoff. Surely the grocery bill isn’t as large as what I shell out on bills. Surely it can’t cost as much as I pay to keep this household running, a source of constant contention between us, especially after Baby Holt’s birth.

  “I also have to buy all the toilet paper and the paper towels and cleaning supplies,” Boyfriend adds.

  Even though I don’t grocery shop, I know that groceries are expensive. I did grocery shop all by myself for many years before he moved in. That being said, there are many grocery store chains that are pretty cheap. Boyfriend does now go to Costco — because we’ve blended families, apparently we need eight thousand chicken wings. We now also, it seems, need to buy huge packages of toilet paper, as if we’re going on a year-long camping trip. There are also grocery items now in my house that I don’t really agree with, like the sugary cereals Bonus Daughters like, and now Holt likes, too. It doesn’t help that, although Rowan won’t touch any of it, it’s piled high in my cupboard. Rowan is ridiculously health conscious and refuses to eat anything that is not organic. She also demands vegetables with every meal. (Thanks, stupid school, for teaching her about the importance of eating organic, leaving out the part about how much organic-everything costs. Thank you very much! Often I just lie to her, telling her that, yes, the chicken is organic, of course the eggs are organic, and yes, everything on your plate is organic.)

  “Do you know how hard it is to cook a meal that everyone likes?” Boyfriend also asks. He’s right. Although he makes home-cooked dinners that could be served at a five-star restaurant when his girls are around, he gets defensive whenever I mention it. But because he acts like a chef when his children are around, I have started to treat him like a waiter or busboy, or that’s the way I think he must feel. He not only makes the dinner, but he also has to remind the rest of us to put our dirty dishes away. He, too, must know what it feels like to be unappreciated.

  Behind the closed doors of blended families, the arguments over buying food that every kid likes is concealed, guarded like a secret you’d share with only your trusted therapist — which I do. Have these experts not looked at what people in blended families are talking about on comment boards? Like the Hi/Bye Fight, the grocery shopping argument is a real thing in blended families — both ludicrous and seemingly trivial, but something that eats away (pun not intended) at our once splendid blended family. We aren’t just arguing over what he buys and when he buys groceries. We are basically also arguing about who gets the most attention and love.

  Why is this starting to bother me only now? Maybe I’m only starting to notice it now. Unlike the husband who won’t even make his wife a coffee, Boyfriend sometimes still makes me coffee in the morning. Sometimes I’ll make him coffee and bring it to him while he’s in the shower. I know, in these instances, when he lights up when I bring him coffee as he gets ready to go to work, that I still very much love him and he does appreciate me. Even still, the resentment overshadows these small moments of appreciation and is sucking the life out of me, slowly but surely.

  So why do I feel such resentment toward Boyfriend after years of blending? Thanks to my therapist, I think I can say with confidence that, in my opinion, it’s Boyfriend’s seeming sense of entitlement that really irks me. (Boyfriend, of course, will have his own opinion on this.) When a big-ticket item breaks down in the house — the furnace, for example — he expects that me and my ex will pay for it, since it’s not his house (although he lives in it). His action — or inaction — leaves me in a panic to pay for it. And as everyone knows, big-ticket items always seem to break down when your bank account is low. Mostly, I don’t think Boyfriend really thinks about money in the same way I do.

  As bad as this sounds, life was so much more, well, fun when I was with my ex, the father of my daughter. His income meant that I led a pretty fucking good life. When I was with Rowan’s father, there were numerous trips to Maui, where we stayed at the Four Seasons. It didn’t seem like a big deal to walk into a department store and buy three pairs of designer shoes with his credit card — he wouldn’t blink an eye. Once, he bought me diamond earrings, which were beautiful, but I didn’t wear them for months because I thought they looked too flashy. I never worried about money when I was with Ex. I don’t remember paying for anything, or even seeing a bill. When our daughter was born, he didn’t just buy me a Cartier Love bracelet, he also bought me a car. I’m not saying money makes you happier (although it kind of does, at least when you get a high off of buying a $1,200 pair of shoes), but it does make life easier. But money isn’t a guarantee that you’ll stay together, obviously.

  After Ex and I broke up, I found myself actually having to look at bank statements and work on a budget (gawd, I hate that word!). I’m not going to lie — compared to many, I still lead a pretty blessed life. But I had to learn that, no, I could not afford to buy myself three pairs of designer shoes. Staying at the Four Seasons in Maui for ten days was no longer an option. I learned that bills come every single month and that they have to be paid off every single month. After Rowan’s dad and I broke up, I was no longer spoiled rotten with expensive gifts. I had to get used to a new lifestyle and appreciate what I had in the present, not compare what I had in the past.

  Boyfriend’s spending habits, however, even after his expensive divorce, haven’t seemed to change at all. He’ll still buy himself shoes, although he has almost as many pairs as I do. He’ll still lose money at his weekly poker games. And, yeah, it really starts to bug me when Boyfriend talks about expensive cars and points out houses that are worth millions, when I think he should be happy where we are. I mean, for fuck’s sake, the house we live in is worth more than a million dollars. We have a condo in Mexico! When he talks about material things, it annoys me to no end. So not only do I become resentful that I think he thinks that money just falls of the trees in my backyard. I’m also really resentful that he doesn’t realize I actually have made a pretty lucrative career for myself and that I work extremely hard at it, and have for decades. He is happy the money is there but seems to give entirely no fucks where it comes from. I don’t think Boyfriend lacks ambition, but we definitely have a very different definition of ambition.

  I usually work at home, and since Boyfriend is his own boss, he can often do the same. However, it starts to annoy me when he works out of the house. I end up asking him, “Are you going to work today?” I need space and I can’t work knowing he’s at home, even if he’s in another room. Once, I wanted to be with him twenty-four/seven. Now I want to scream, “Go to your office!”

  The issues are starting to pile up. Could it be we are just … not compatible? The thought is like a knife through my heart.

  When I was dating, the first thing I would do, if I went back to a guy’s place, is look at their bookshelves or the books just lying around their homes. If there were no books, that was a warning sign to me, a definite red flag, and there would be no follow-up date. I’m not sure why I let this rule slide with
Boyfriend. When I first visited his house and was scouting about the place, like a detective looking for clues, and didn’t see any books around, I should have known that this might be a problem. But I think I excused the fact that he didn’t read or have any books around, because the oh-so-handsome-but-underemployed-guy I was dating right before him read all the time and had hundreds of books, and that relationship didn’t work out. I was trying on something new with Boyfriend by dating a guy who only read the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition and, occasionally, the sports pages of the paper. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

  What is wrong, in my opinion, is that Boyfriend rarely reads anything I write, nor does he seem to notice or recognize that publishing nine books is a huge accomplishment, one that paid for the place in Mexico. He doesn’t seem to care that my career allows me to buy him expensive gifts and pay for the gardener and taxes, which I was and am happy to do. (Make that: I have to do.) But because I can’t seem to lower my expectations, it hurts when I don’t get recognition or praise, especially from Boyfriend, who is supposed to be my number one cheerleader. Although I write a weekly blog, which I post on my social feeds, Boyfriend rarely, if ever, reads it. I feel like if he was, in fact, on my team, he’d read my stuff, taking three minutes out of his day to do so. I’d like to think he’s proud of me and my work too, but, no, he isn’t. If he was, wouldn’t he say something to me like, “I loved your latest story!” instead of, “I haven’t had time to read it.” So, yes, it seems to me that he only cares about the fruits of the labour, rather than the labour itself.

  I break out with pimples around my jawline. Stupid stress pimples. I make an appointment with my dermatologist, who also happens to be in a blended family.

  “What can I say?” my dermatologist says when I moan about my stress pimple flare-ups and tell her I blame it on Boyfriend and me not getting along. “It’s a long-term process. Believe me, I know! It’s been twelve years for us. At this point, the only thing holding us together is our weekly couple’s therapy.”

  I ask her, point blank, not just about what the hell she’s going to do to get rid of the stress pimples, but also why the fuck she stays in her marriage if they are so unhappy. How much money, I wonder, do she and her husband spend on therapy just to keep their relationship alive and to feel equals in their blended households? Their weekly couple’s therapy, she says, is the only place her husband really hears her complaints, mostly because the therapist sides with her and asks her husband, “Do you hear what she’s saying?”

  As she pops my pimples with a needle, I actually attempt to do the math. If their couple’s therapist charges them $250 a week (a standard price for most therapists) and there are fifty-two weeks in a year, that means they spend … wait … still doing the math … $13,000 a year! And they’ve been going to couple’s therapy for two years now.

  “How do I make it work and make myself happy?” she asks, after I ask if there’s some manual going around that I’m missing. “I just make sure that I go out with my girlfriends every Thursday night to let off steam. And I’ll go away a few times a year for girls’ weekends to Vegas.” So, my dermatologist just admitted that what keeps them together is not just weekly couple’s therapy, but also the fact that she makes a point to get away from her husband and their blended household. Even though it is painful to have these stress pimples popped, it is nice to hear that someone else feels the same way I do and that her blended family is basically being held together by safety pins. They spend $13,000 a year to keep fighting to blend. Staying in a successful blended family, it turns out, can also be fucking expensive.

  “I think everyone was just on their best behaviour when we decided to blend our families,” my dermatologist continues. “Then, a couple years in … I don’t know, it seemed to come out of nowhere, and things started to flare up. I became used to feeling like a stranger in my own home. I’m the one who does the grocery shopping. And I never get it right,” she tells me after I have just told her how annoyed I get with the way Boyfriend goes grocery shopping. “There is always something that someone in my family finds missing. I tell them to write it down on the grocery list, but they never do, even though it’s right there on the kitchen counter! More than once I’ve sent my husband out to buy groceries, but he’s terrible at it. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if he came home one day with dog food, and we don’t have a dog. So I just do it myself, and when the kids or my husband complains, I just tell them they can go grocery shopping for themselves.”

  Who knew the bullshit and — What is it that I’m feeling? Um, like I’m holding a grudge — over what Boyfriend chooses to buy while grocery shopping is a common argument on both sides. At the very least, it’s irritating when he tells me that what he pays for groceries is more than what he would pay chipping in for rent. What bothers me is that I don’t feel he’s really thinking of me. But while I’m annoyed by how Boyfriend shops, without him recognizing that he buys a shitload more groceries and makes dinners mostly only when his children are around, others in blended families make excuses to go grocery shopping, just so they can get away from the craziness in their own blended households. Yes, many of us in blended families will even do outside chores to get some alone time.

  Unfortunately, I can never make that excuse. Boyfriend knows I can’t cook and haven’t the slightest interest in learning to cook. I’d rather do anything than grocery shop for our blended family — Costco both amazes and terrifies me — so I shouldn’t complain, right? But I do gripe about this. Sometimes it’s warranted, and sometimes maybe not so much.

  · ELEVEN ·

  I am starting to get private messages from “friends” on social media, people I’ve never met in person but who know I’m in a blended family, because I have written about it and have posted photographs of our children.

  “Hi Rebecca,” one such message starts, when I open my inbox. “I believe we haven’t formally met, but I read your posts and I am embarking on blending a family. So, so hard! Would love to know if you have any advice and can offer some insight into what to expect. Thanks so much and hope you’re great!” It’s like receiving a message from a childhood friend you haven’t talked to in twenty years and they ask, “So what’s new?” I mean, where would I even start?

  These messages make me feel like a sought-out therapist, but one with no real credentials, except for the fact that I know, and am learning more and more every day, about the chaos and bullshit of blending families and what it is like to be in one. I’m not sure how to respond to these messages, because I suddenly remember, especially because of the message, that blending wasn’t as easy a transition as I had thought it actually was.

  When we first blended and Boyfriend’s two daughters stayed with us, I had, in fact, witnessed him trying to calm them down when they had mini-meltdowns occasionally. Sometimes it was just the eldest daughter who was in tears. But mostly, it was his youngest daughter, bless her, who used to cry to her father, while I patiently waited, sometimes for hours, as he reassured her that he didn’t love me more than her.

  “It’s not about loving someone more. It’s just a different kind of love,” Boyfriend would tell her. His children didn’t always believe him, as they cried in their new beds in their new bedroom in their new house, adjusting to their dad’s new life and, by extension, their new lives. And why would they believe him? His answer, though true, sounded like a platitude. And they were still getting over their parents’ divorce when I entered the picture just two months after he had moved out from his marital home. Plus, they were almost pre-teens, so their emotions were all wonky, like when you update your phone and it seems possessed for the next two days. Unlike my daughter, who only ever knew her parents not being together, since we split up when she was just turning three, Boyfriend’s daughters were still processing their parents’ divorce and the fact that they were now children of divorce. They needed a lot of reassurance, a lot of extra attention, and extra love.

  And, even though he
may not have recognized it, and I didn’t either until it was too late, Boyfriend, I think, was going through an incredible amount of shame and guilt, and also enormous pressure to make sure his children were both emotionally and mentally okay. Boyfriend didn’t want to be with his ex-wife, was never going to get back together with her, but he certainly didn’t want his daughters to feel such sorrow, to feel loved less, or to be worried that they were to blame for their parents’ breakup.

  Unlike my friend who says it’s silly to “pretend” that you love bio children differently than the ones who come along after blending, I felt a sense of responsibility that I had to care for Boyfriend’s daughters, make them happy, and believed that eventually I would fall in love with them. But, as everyone knows, you can’t force love. And, looking back, what the fuck did I know about raising children who weren’t biologically my own? What did I know about being a child of divorce?

  The virtual friend who had asked for advice, adding, “Blending families is so, so hard,” is right. In fact, even though she’s just about to embark on blending, her words resonate with me more than any expert advice I have read. Sure, saying that blending is “so, so hard,” is not a very interesting description of what happens when blending, but it is so, so true. Blending families is so, so fucking hard!

  Oddly, later on the same day, I get a text from a divorced male acquaintance who has shared custody with his children and wants to chat. We aren’t exactly friends — we haven’t ever gone out or even met for coffee — we’re more virtual or texting friends. I tell him that Boyfriend would not like it if I met up with him, which is true, but I also tell him that I don’t think his girlfriend would like it if we met for coffee either.

  By this point, Boyfriend doesn’t like it if I go out with Rowan and her dad when he is in town, even though I think it’s wonderful for Rowan to see that her father and I can and do get along. So, no, I don’t tell Boyfriend about these calls, because he’ll get jealous, and then, of course, another bullshit fight would ensue about how I can’t be friends with people of the opposite sex. I definitely can’t be friends with people I once dated, not because I think it’s wrong, but because Boyfriend does, and because I love him, I don’t want to hurt his feelings.