Wednesday, November 22, 2023

It's Complicated

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It's Complicated

Carrie Monroe O’Keefe

Nov 22

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When I was little, the holidays were my favorite. My parents were divorced when I was young, I had stepparents, and this meant multiple families took turns showering me with gifts. This was true of both birthdays and Christmas. I’m already pretty obsessed with Christmas, but when you can stretch the family gatherings to nearly a month of gift-receiving-extravaganzas? Heaven.

It didn’t start to take a toll until I got into my later teen years and after. When there was barely enough time to do all the things I wanted with my friends, and then my immediate family, going to those additional extended family celebrations started to feel like a lot of work. The gifts no longer covered up the awkwardness of being with parts of the family that didn’t really know me at all. It became an exercise in patience and doing things you don’t really want to do. Eventually (and I mean, not until my 30s) I stopped going to the celebrations that felt like a chore and only continued to go to those that brought actual joy.

I experienced living in a blended family long before I had a blended family of my own. I knew what it felt like, as a kid, to split time. To try to figure out how to see all of the people for particular events. To have my life milestones attended by groups of people who felt more like the Jets and the Sharks than members of my own larger family.

Sidenote - I referenced the Jets and Sharks last week in a meeting and nobody knew what I was talking about. There are no words.

The holidays and life celebrations are some of the times that being in a blended family, or being a stepparent, can feel particularly tricky.

A couple of weeks ago I got a call from a girlfriend I haven’t spoken to in many months. She’s one of my few girlfriends who is also a stepmom. And, like me, she’s a stepmom with no biological children of her own.

I mean - aside from our dogs.

She has a daughter getting married and she found out she wasn’t being invited to shop for wedding dresses. After talking it through, we agreed that it probably would have been a sh-t show if she’d gone. The personalities involved would not have allowed for a pleasant day. And because one of the pitfalls of being a child of multiple parents is trying to please all of the parents, it would have been the opposite of what she wanted her daughter to experience: a really fun and joyful day.

Logically it all made sense, but it still stung.

So many of us grow up with ideas of how we will raise our children. The traditions we were raised with that we want to continue with our own kids. The experiences we expect and plan to have with them. Things like wedding dress shopping with our daughters if they choose to marry. When we sign-up to be stepparents, we also kind of sign-up to be a part of someone else’s adventure. This means that things we’ve hoped to do with our kids, sometimes, don’t happen as planned.

Therein lies the rub.

How do we impart our wisdom, pass down traditions, feel like we’ve properly raised our kids when our kids are – technically – someone else’s? And they’re only with us a portion of the time, depending on custody agreements that were, in many cases, decided before we entered the picture? And if what we think is important is not important to the other people raising our kids? And how do we fulfill our ideas of parenthood when all of these things are at play?

Let alone celebrate the holidays in the ways we want to celebrate with our families.

In our family, our girls have two sets of parents, six sets of grandparents, five aunts or uncles with their own families, countless cousins, and they are young adults so they’re creating friend-families of their own. Trying to nail them down for the things we think are important in the holiday season is next to impossible. It’s not our year for Thanksgiving, but it is our year for Christmas, so we’re doing our best to give them dates well in advance that we hope to have them with us and to handle the rejection (which always comes in some way or another) with grace and understanding. Sometimes we’re good at this, sometimes we’re not.

The holidays are still my favorite, even if they are a little more complicated than I thought they’d be when I had my own family. I wish all of you a joyful Thanksgiving week with your families - whatever that may look like this year - and the ability to be okay with it not being what you expected or planned.

My new book “Mamacadabra” is available on 11/22/23. Order your copy now!