As I reminisced about the weekend on a flight last spring between Chicago and my home in Seattle, I was struck by the thought that, contrary to what I had long believed, I grew up in a big family. Although I have just one brother and each of my parents has only one sibling, these people are my immediate family only as defined in traditional terms.
Over the weekend I had been a bridesmaid in my ex-stepsister’s wedding party. Her mother and my father divorced 10 years ago; it had been at least that long since I had seen the many people who at one time were my stepgrandparents, -aunts, -uncles, and -cousins. And it was years since I had seen the woman who was my stepmother for eight years of my childhood, a woman with whom, all involved would admit, I had not had the best relationship.
Doing “the twist” with the bride’s grandfather, talking with her young cousins about the Seattle scene, discussing family life with older people at the rehearsal dinner, the weekend was a much-needed respite from the uncertainties of job hunting. But the most remarkable incident was the conversation I had with the woman who was once my stepmother, who married my father when I was 5 and left my life when I was 13.
Unexpectedly, she and I were left alone in the living room during a quiet moment on the night before the wedding. The bride-to-be and her best friend had gone to the store on a quick errand; the groom was staying at his mother’s house for the night; the rest of the wedding party was asleep at a nearby motel.
Near midnight, I was getting tired, but it seemed this house would not be winding down for a while. Besides, something in my former stepmother’s expression had intrigued me. There was a gentleness in her blue eyes that I had not remembered seeing as a child; I wondered if I was imagining it. We were both ready to talk. I don’t remember who asked the first question, but soon we were engaged in a conversation about the fears and anxieties that arise from loss of relationships, and about what we do with these emotions when there seems to be little safety in expressing them.
I had ended a painful relationship only days before I came to the wedding; I was feeling raw and vulnerable, my newly single status bringing back a future that loomed unknown and uncertain. In Seattle, my best friend had been out of the country for months; no one else could listen to me the way she could. I had desperately needed someone to talk to, but when I tried to talk to the few people I saw each day my words felt empty, and my sentences trailed off into silence.
During that night with my ex-stepmother I found someone who heard me, someone who had known me since I was a small child. As we moved from the confines of the living room out to the patio beneath the night sky, I found that with her I was able to share some of the more painful memories of the last year, and that she could relate similar experiences in her life to mine. I gained a new understanding of the pain she was in when I was a child, which helped to explain the sometimes harsh ways she treated me, and she offered me understanding of the fear and uncertainties I faced as a young woman. I had found an attentive ear, in probably the last place I would have expected it.
Almost half of all marriages in the United States end in divorce. Many people who divorce will soon marry again, bringing the children from an earlier marriage with them into their new relationship. In the public discourse, divorce statistics are often presented in their most negative light-as indicators of the decay of our society and its values, as both cause and effect of social instability, as a prescription of inevitable doom for anyone foolish enough to believe in lasting trust and romantic love. Many of us, certainly, have seen the numbers, thought about our own situations and wondered about our own (and society’s) children. What will the future be like, we ask, for children growing up in such disorder, with confusing relationships that are not easily named or explained, without a tidy picture of mother/father/sister/brother to put on the desk in their dorm room or office?
With this question in mind, the memory of my conversation with my former stepmother led me to consider what I have gained from the people who have been in my life through marriage, divorce and remarriage (my mother and father married young and each has been married three times, so there are many).
I thought about my first stepfather, a man who was present in my life from the time I was 3 until he died when I was 13, and who is the father of the brother I adore. I thought about the stepmother I now have, a woman close to me in age with whom I am finding commonalty as we both grow older, with whom in the last year I have started to laugh as we mellow some. I thought about my second stepfather, a man whose diligence and commitment were a lesson to me as an adolescent, and the man to whom I will always be grateful for becoming a father to my brother after my first stepfather died.
Granted, it is not as though these changes, losses and new presences in my family/families were easy for me; they were not. It is not as though for many years I did not feel the loss and fear that come with such changes; I still do. But my experience at my stepsister’s wedding prompted me to consider the richness of experience I have gained from the many members of my family, regardless of the labels, “ex-“, “step-“, “half-“, that can serve to diminish the real roles they played-and continue to play-in my life.
The names that we give to family relationships are interpreted by others to imply the degree of meaningfulness of those relationships. “Mother” and “father” are considered “real,” while “stepmother” and “stepfather” connote a distant relationship from the start. “Ex-” implies “former” for everyone, not just for the partner who is divorced. The way these labels minimize the importance of another person in one’s life has been made clear to me when I have tried to talk about the death of my first stepfather. Often I have sensed the unspoken response from friends: “Well, it’s not like he was your real father.” And because he and my mother were divorced before he died-making him my “ex-“, “step-“, “father”-some people perceive him as twice removed from someone close to me, as though his loss was that much easier to bear.
The reason I suddenly realized on the airplane that I come from a big family is that I, too, have been affected by the distancing abstractions we use to name the very real people in our lives. Where do an ex-stepsister, an ex-stepmother, two stepfathers and the stepmother who entered my life when I was almost grown fit into an orderly pattern in the way that I conceive of my family? Or in the way that I explain my family to others? Who do those people become in my memory-the cousins and parents and siblings of stepparents, the people I met at family gatherings and played with in the back yard-when my own mother or father is no longer married into their family? Was my ex-stepmother just an older woman friend that night before the wedding, or is there some significance to the fact that she knew me when I was young and had a hand in raising me?
We too often consider divorced families and see only breaks and divisions; with multiply-divorced families, the fractures can seem too numerous to comprehend. But if we allow ourselves to consider as relatives the people who survive, regardless of how we name them, we may find a richness of memory, a multiplicity of experience of the sort that is implied when people talk about the beauty of joys and sorrows shared in an extended family.
The children growing up in today’s divorced families do not have it easy. The changes, dislocations and uncertainties of divorce and remarriage do not make for the sort of childhood anyone would consider ideal. But we might lessen some of the pain if we recognize relationships that were created by marriage and that continue to exist after divorce. We can understand that “ex-“, “step-” and “half-” are a shorthand explaining the legal union or breakup of two people, and that for others involved (and perhaps for those two people as well) the relationships so named may still be very real, may be whole parts of their lives, may offer emotional sustenance in unexpected places.
On my windowsills at home and on my shelf at the office sit a scattering of picture frames. When someone visits, it can take some time to point out the faces and explain each person’s relationship to me. There is not enough space for all the pictures, so I switch them around every so often and some stay in a drawer until I make room for them again.
I don’t have a neat photograph of my mother, my father, my brother and myself but I have numbers of others with each of these people in them, and the people they love and care for as well. It sometimes can be confusing, these pictures in their odd-size frames, a few of the same people showing up at different ages in each one. But I like the clutter; and I appreciate how the photographs form their own story, a collage of faces before the window or beside my desk.
And since that plane flight last spring, when someone I’ve just met comes to my house or office, I’ve had a new approach. Instead of trying to explain the technical, legal relationship of each person in each photograph, I wave my hand over them all, shake my head, smile and say, “That’s my family.”
