Nice essay on the building a patchwork family and the particularly painful decision to leave a good enough marriage when there are children involved. An overwhelming majority of folks who are in decent marriages, do their best to maintain status quo. While there maybe the secret yen for change, the gnawing doubts about if this can be the partnership for life, people realize finding good enough is a miracle too. To that end there is the concept of a "parenting marriage" and the rising wave of gray divorces. A parenting marriage simply cannot last after the parenting done. The couple is forced to reorganize in some sense - look the other way or part ways, whichever is less painful, less disruptive.
To me, ‘blended’ suggests a homogenised state of merging; or, more precisely, of erasing differences and becoming indivisible; the new family, a seamlessly repaired vessel trying to replicate the original before it was ruptured. This attempt at merging into one is where so many stepfamilies go wrong. How families deal with this tension differs dramatically according to what age the children are when the adults meet, and how active a role the stepparent takes in everyday parenting. The term ‘blended’ risks denying this tension. The stepparent is a parent and not yet a parent, the stepfamily is a family but not a family, and one of the base-level challenges to the stepfamily is that its bonds, at least initially, give primacy to pre-existing biological connections rather than the romance that birthed it. Blending is a process that can happen over decades, and sometimes not at all.
Undertaking to blend families can come from a place of courage or desperation. Sometimes there is a bit of both. The process is never quite done, things are never quite evenly blended.
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