Monday, May 24, 2010

Out of Step

I have what is termed a "blended" family, his, mine, our kids. The term suggests we could be whirled together and come out a perfectly homogenized group, our cell structures broken down and joined into something new. But after almost nine years, I'm prepared to say it is as far from a whirlingly perfect, bonded unit as it ever was. And I don't understand, but am feeling defeat.

My step children are each interesting, bright, engaged, hard-working adults. One has married and started her own family, her two children just a few years apart from my youngest two girls. We should have much in common. But I'm out of step with my steps. And I'm not sure the dance was ever one I could have joined, as I came late to this particular party where the music stays the same.

What does it mean to be in a family but not OF a family?

I'm neither mother nor friend, not confidant nor enemy. I'm somewhere in the vast between that is tolerated, but mostly treated, even if unintentionally, as a non - non-important, non-person, non-family; not ME. I'm smiled at, talked a bit to, but it was over 6 years before my step-son asked if I had brothers or sisters. That is how little interest I hold. I am the Wife of the Dad. That is my place, my definition, my sum total. And I thought I'd eventually carve my place out in the family I joined, but my tools have failed to make a visible mark. I've failed to make a difference. And why escapes me.

Sure, they visit us; we visit them. There are pleasant times. But there is past that looms large in every visit, every conversation, especially those I don't participate in. They have a shared history, experiences I don't know and cannot judge. I respect that. I anticipated it. What I didn't anticipate: the fact that somehow their Father, in their beliefs and memories, failed them in their childhood and young adulthood, wasn't the person they wanted or needed him to be, and that impression, that mark, that wound has not healed - in fact it is exacerbated by me, and the family I started with him, since they see him acting as the Father they think they never had.

So out of step. Each of us, with the other.

Yet I know as I entered adulthood, I came to understand that my parents were people, flawed people with wounds that caused actions and emotions both hurtful and deeply damaging to me and their other children - but they did the best they could with the lessons they learned from their families, the tools they had at hand and chose to use. Were there resources they ignored? Yes. Were there things they could have done differently if they were more enlightened, more insightful, less gutted by their own losses and disappointments? Yes. But they didn't. And I forgave them and chose to take them as they are - as human beings with a past, a present and a future that still had dreams for them. A person entitled to be taken as they are today, not the person of 40 years ago, but the person who survived and lived those years, changed, shifted, learned, grew. Not entirely different, but significantly not the same.

I wish they could each get to this point with their own Dad. Realize they did have the core of him, even if the years have taught him, as they have taught me, patience, perspective, acceptance he didn't possess when young. And then maybe, just maybe their steps would fall into place with his, and then there would be a new dance, new memories, and new bond that extends to me, as a complete and full person with my own past, my own lessons, my own family, my own life that I have strived for, fought for, dreamed of, earned.

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