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OUR DAUGHTER WILL BE GETTING MARRIED SOON. My husband and I recently met our future son-in-law, Ed, who seems to be a great guy. He has a good job providing a comfortable income. He's a spiritual man, with many talents, well thought of in the community, and, more important, he's head over heels in love with our daughter -- as she is with him.
We especially pray for their happiness because they're not your average twentysomething couple starting their marital journey with all the idealism of youth. They're in their late 30s, each bringing to this union the baggage of failed prior marriages. They wish to recommit -- to try again, in Samuel Johnson's words, ""the triumph of hope over experience.'' As all parents do, we want this marriage not only to succeed but to flourish.
Like many other couples starting over, they have children -- his daughter, her two girls. Their honeymoon will be brief. Then it's instant family. Mothering and fathering children they've known a short time. Two last names on the mailbox. Two girls in the house, a third there every other weekend. Child-support payments going out and coming in. One child's mother across town, a father a state away. Children confused over loyalties to the parents they live with and those they visit. The couple pulled in opposite directions by the wants and needs of their kids and their own need to form a successful, intimate marital relationship.
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Their situation is pretty complex, but, these days, quite common. Some ""step'' families are more complicated than the word implies. Ours is one such family. I began by saying that our daughter will be getting married. Technically this is not true. My husband and I are in a second marriage ourselves, and the bride is my husband's child.
He was a widowed father of nine and I the divorced mother of four when we met at Parents Without Partners 16 years ago. Of the 13 children between us, only his four oldest were out of the house and on their own. The other nine children ranged in age from 4 to 19. Even though he and I were crazy about each other, we knew that combining our two households was not a good idea. Too many kids reared with different parenting styles. Two religions. Two income levels. Too much age difference (he is nearly a generation older than I). Yet we loved each other, so we became a weekend family of sorts, courting one another while surrounded by kids. Eventually the kids grew up, and six years ago we married. Our long courtship helped solidify the mutual affection all of us now enjoy. We are a family. But still the bonds are fragile.
Questions arise as to who is family. Will our daughter's new family be a family of four, made up of those who live in the house? Or a family of five -- the four plus the child who visits on weekends? In their home, who is the real parent? Who sets the rules? When does the mother relinquish some of her parenting role to her husband? When does the stepparent step in; when does he or she back off? How much time should the visiting child spend alone with her father and how much time with her new family?
Then there's the question of what they call one another. If a child calls her stepfather ""Dad,'' does this take something away from her real father? When children speak about their parents, whom are they referring to? When parents say ""our children,'' should they explain the relationship?
In divorce, some words have taken on new meaning in our vernacular. Most states don't call it ""divorce,'' but rather ""dissolution of marriage,'' as if the process were some chemical reaction. A former spouse is an ""ex'' -- it implies a prior position that no longer exists, but also suggests the unknown in math. Do our former in-laws become ""ex-laws''? Or ""out-laws''?
Whether ""joint,'' ""shared,'' ""residential,'' ""sole'' or ""split,'' parents either have, lose or give up ""custody'' of their offspring -- custody being a term applied to criminals. ""Visitation'' used to mean making a call to someone hospitalized or going to a funeral home; now it means seeing your own children via some prearranged schedule, possibly devised with the assistance of a family mediator, perhaps by court order.
Our language is even more heavily laden with family terms beginning with ""step.'' Ed will be my stepson-in-law, but there's no simple way to state the relationship between his daughter, Amy, and me. She and I will be related only by the slender threads of two remarriages: her father's to my husband's daughter and mine to my husband. Amy becomes my husband's stepgranddaughter, his daughter's stepdaughter, his granddaughters' stepsister or his son-in-law's daughter. But to me, the linguistic link is truly unwieldy: my husband's stepgranddaughter, my stepdaughter's stepdaughter, my stepgrandchildren's stepsister!
Yet whatever we choose to call this relationship created through two remarriages, Amy will be part of our family. She will likely spend some Christmases at our home. She may join our granddaughters when they come to Kansas for their vacation. We've already begun sending her birthday cards and the same holiday treats and trinkets grandmothers (even stepgrandmothers) send grandchildren throughout the year. We will remember her in our thoughts and prayers as we do the other kids in the family.
All this has not escaped Amy, 11 years old going on 35. At our last meeting she asked me, ""What shall I call you? You're like a grandmother, but not really my grandmother. I have two grandmothers already, you know.'' (What she didn't say was that should her mother remarry, she will have one more.)
""I know,'' I said with a sigh, ""it is pretty complicated.'' We talked a bit, trying to make sense of this convoluted, many-branched, pruned and grafted family tree. We discussed some of the choices, tried out some of the step-this, step-that options, even suggested a step/step or double-step something or other. Each sounded more ridiculous than the last. Finally we decided it would be ""Amy and Jan, Jan and Amy.'' That would have to do.
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