There seems to be a national or international day for just about everything and every occasion any more. Yesterday was National Stepfamily Day - and even though I'm a day late I have some thoughts about step families and I don't want to wait until next year to blog about them.
With the divorce rate somewhere around forty percent, it is hard to find a family which isn't a step family in some way. When I first told my parents that I wanted to get a divorce I heard things like: "No one in our family has ever been divorced!" Translated: There was a stigma about divorce and you're not going to embarrass our family; also, "You have to stay married for the sake of your son." Truth was there had been a divorce in Dad's family - a first cousin of his, but they didn't have any children.
In my parent's and grandparent's generations, the only way there were stepparents and stepchildren was if someone died and the surviving spouse remarried.
I never think of my oldest son, Doug (on the right) as being a half-brother of Kari's & Preston's. Because I raised the three of them together I just think of them as brothers and sister. Of course I think of Doug's other siblings, Dawn, Dana & Darin, as half-siblings simply because he did not grow up with them. Becoming better acquainted with Dana last year made me aware of the error in my thinking.
Mark was eleven when I became his stepmother. He did not live with us, thus my role was less difficult than it can be for custodial stepparents. My biggest concern was whether or not he liked me. I cared about him because he was the son of my husband. Our relationship was always respectful and cordial. Over the years we started kidding about me being his 'wicked stepmother' or simply WSM. Somewhere along the line I realized I love Mark as a son, not a stepson.
My son Doug's family is also a blended one with only Zach and Katrina being full brother and sister and half-siblings of Brock & Alyssa who are also half-siblings to one another.
When Bud and I married, he not only became a stepfather, he became a step-grandfather. I don't think any of the grandchildren think of him as being a step-grandfather - to them he is just Grandpa. For Zach and Katrina, he has been their only grandfather. And Katrina has been stepmother to Brad's sons, Michael and Nicholas, since they were quite young.
The day before National Stepfamily Day, my grandson Brock married Paullina making her not only his wife but a stepmother.......
to his little boy Ridge -pictured here with his step-aunt, Alex, and the flower-girl, Quinn. (I'm not sure if she is a relative or just the daughter of friends.) By this point, the whole stepfamily relationships begin to take on a tangled web aspect. (The jars on the table are for the Unity Sand Ceremony which was something new to me. You can read about it here.)
As I get older, I realize those labels don't matter as much any more. The hard feelings once generated by divorce have dissipated. I'm once again friends with some of my former in-laws. (In all fairness, there are a few former grudges I'm still holding on to.) But I'd like to be more like my Grandma Delphia - after she died in 1991, we discovered that in her family bible she had recorded my first husband Kenny's date of death. That was long after we had been divorced and I thought it was strange she would still consider him part of the family. My mother and aunt enlightened me: (Their) "Mom always said, once a member of the family, always a member of the family".
Perhaps just one day a year, on September 16, all the blended families can put aside differences and celebrate National Stepfamily Day. And just maybe they'll realize it makes life easier to at least be respectful and cordial and they'll decide to expand beyond a single day.
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