Blending Families

Emily: We’re back! This time we’re talking about ‘parenting without authority.’ Basically, being partnered with another adult who also has kids. It would be much easier to consciously couple without kids, I’m just sayin’. Our last post was about being an interracial couple. In this one, we pull back the curtain on how we blended our families together which is still very much a work in progress.

Also, note: at this point I’m a guest writer on Brett’s blog, and I’m fine with it. If we ever got famous (laughing over here), he’d have to give me full credit for all of this or he’d be a dead man. He knows this. This is what makes our relationship special.

Brett: I don’t understand how one can take full credit for a blog post where each section is labeled with the author’s name.

Emily: FULL CREDIT.

Brett: It is interesting to note that our first co-authored blog post was my most popular ever by an order of magnitude. Apparently people enjoy our personal lives more than my thoughts on technology and the entertainment industry 🤷🏻‍♂️

How did you introduce the kids?

Brett: After Emily and I had been dating for only a few weeks I took my kids on a trip to the Oregon Coast for a few days. At that point Emily and I texted on the regular, and my daughter, 13 at that time, was very snoopy. She saw a message from “Emily Meadows” pop up on my iPad and she asked if that was someone I worked with. “Uh, sure” was my knee-jerk response.

I make it a point not to lie to my kids, but she caught me off guard and a three-week-old relationship is not one that you reveal to your kids. I thought I’d gotten away with it, but my daughter was far more resourceful than I imagined. She looked Emily up on Facebook and LinkedIn (using a fake account!) to confirm that Emily and I didn’t work together.

Over the course of the next few months I would occasionally refer to my friend Emily hoping that she would take the hint gradually (I had no idea that she’d already figured this all out). Then one day (months later) when my daughter and I were alone together one night I asked if she wanted to meet Emily for dinner (it’s a very odd sensation being nervous to ask a question of your child) and she enthusiastically said “yes.”

After that my kids and I would meet up with Emily’s kids on occasion for activities like bowling and trampolining. Not only did the kids accept each other, they seemed to really enjoy hanging out together which is the most awesome thing you can experience as a parent looking to create a new normal.

Emily: Yep, this. I think we bumped into each other at the farmers market once? I remember seeing Brett’s oldest and thinking that she was freaking radiantly beautiful. And I remember that we were standing near the tortilla chip and salsa stand. I mean, these are the important details, right? My kids really had NO CLUE yet. They wouldn’t know until months later. We took things really slow on the kid front.

Also — Brett brought me back Voodoo Donuts from Portland, Oregon (re: his above-mentioned Oregon trip). He dropped them off at my house on a Sunday night and I think we made out in his car because we were being all stealthy and it was fun. My kids literally thought that a magical fairy left donuts at our front door, haha. That shit doesn’t happen anymore. Ain’t love grand?

Brett: Be right back, I’m going on a donut run.

What were your concerns about throwing four kids together?

Brett: Mostly that they’d grow to hate each other. Thankfully they all get along rather well and in ways that really surprised me. They occasionally get on each other’s nerves, but mostly in ways that are unavoidable with kids that spend so much time together.

I affectionately refer to our combined family as The Six Pack.

Emily: YES WE ARE SO LUCKY. The kids really love each other. It is pretty wonderful. During the early quarantine period (March/April), having all of us in the house often felt like a party because we were being social and eating crap food together. FUN.

What is it like parenting another person’s kids?

Emily: I think my first failure was in thinking that I would parent Brett’s kids at all. I laugh now at how naive I was. I tried to strike a balance between being a friend, an adult, an ish-parent, a comedian, and a cool mom, and it wasn’t working. One evening I asked each ‘kid’ (my kids and Brett’s kids) to help do one household chore, and the reaction from one of his kids was… very very very like how you’d expect a teenager to react. I dropped it quickly, all the while cursing under my breath. I mean — IT IS MY HOUSE AND EVERYONE NEEDS TO PITCH IN. But it wasn’t as if I was going to force that kid to do a chore.

That night, I texted a friend of mine, begging for her advice on parenting someone else’s kids (specifically parenting a teenager). She was in a similar situation, except she’d remarried, and she’d seemingly figured it all out. Nope. She confirmed that this shit ain’t easy.

So I turned to Google, as one does, and asked it for advice. Google brought up lots of articles which all felt wrong. None of them described our exact family and our exact situation. And then I stumbled on a blog post written by a woman who was trying to parent teenagers, and you know what she said? She said “FUCK IT.” This is when I had my ‘ah ha’ moment. From that moment on, I vowed to be the following to both of Brett’s kids: a good listener, a safe place to hang out, a fellow Tik Tok-er, a provider of sugar, a provider of things they need without asking (like wax strips), and I mostly just vowed to be myself. I vowed to leave the authority shit to Brett. It doesn’t come up often, but if there needs to be a bad guy in the house with his kids, it’s him, END STOP.

Brett: My experience is different than Emily’s because her kids are younger than mine, and I spend more time with them than vice versa because while Emily has a 50/50 schedule, while mine is more like 60/40 (not my preference, but it is what it is).

Ish-parent is a good way to put it. I’ve been a parent for a long time and can’t help feeling like a parent to her kids after having spent so much time with them and growing to love them. But regardless I am still secondary, Emily ultimately calls the shots with those two.

One night Emily’s daughter told me that she didn’t want to call me “Dad.” I assured her that I’d never ask her to, she already has a dad and I don’t need to fill that role in her life, even though I do play the role of an (ish-)parent. I attend their school events, I drive them around, I cook for them, and we all vacation together. Also I’ve introduced Emily’s son to important cultural touchstones like Star Wars and Marvel, franchises neither of his parents cares much about.

What is it like to balance two parenting schedules?

Brett: It’s complicated.

At first, Emily and I had very incompatible schedules, our alternating kid weekends were even out of sync. During this period we occasionally resorted to babysitters (including on our first date) and taking days off of work.

Fortunately I managed to renegotiate my schedule a bit and Emily got her weekend cadence switched, so since then it has been much better, though still not easy. For one thing we both have to work with our ex-spouses to plan trips together. Summertime is especially nuts with trying to find holes in the calendar that don’t conflict with summer camps, cheer practices and Emily’s August talent reviews.

Emily: I’d add that very early on, like probably on our first date, Brett and I agreed that kids are #1 most important. If one of us has an opportunity to spend extra time with a kid, we do it, no questions asked. Those of you who have been divorced will understand that transitioning from having your kids 100% of the time to sharing them with an ex is HARD. I felt as if I couldn’t get enough of my kids, and I know Brett felt the same.

You know what’s nice about this schedule though? Two things: 1) I appreciate the HELL out of my kids (all of our kids) when they are here. It is a joy. And, 2) Brett and I get adult time together without our kids. It is the most amazing thing and really I think this is what all couples need. Not like a date night where you are trying to squeeze all of the adult bonding into a 2 hour period (often while paying a babysitter), but like DAYS to just be.

Are we missing anything?

Emily: Yes. Our society doesn’t have words for the life we’re living. One of the hardest things has been helping our kids to label what we are to each other, and labels are important. Over time they have mostly started to call each other ‘step-brother’ or ‘step-sister’. At the beginning I encouraged them to say ‘ish-brother’ and ‘ish-sister.’ It boggles my mind that you have to get married in order to have terms to use to describe a loving family.

Brett: We’ve started using the label “partner” to refer to each other because “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” don’t seem to adequately describe a couple who live together with each other’s kids.

There is of course a simple solution to the label problem…

What did you think of the fly on Pence’s head during the VP debate?

Emily: First of all, I didn’t want to watch the debate. I am very protective of my emotional wellbeing right now, and these debates feel stressful as fuck to me. I know I’m not alone in this feeling. But the VP debate was during prime time on one of our kid nights (see how I’m pulling the two topics together, kids + the fly on Pence’s head), I had dinner to cook, and hell if I was going to cook dinner while Brett sat downstairs watching the debate on TV. He’s a smart man, so he intuited this and turned on the debate upstairs on his Mac. This is how I involuntarily got sucked into cheering my head off and yelling profanity while watching the VP debate. I walked away from the debate remembering why Kamala was my first pick for president — she is a powerful woman of color who just MAKES ME SO PROUD.

Anyhow, that fly on Pence’s head stole the show. It was the most animated thing about Pence, if we’re all telling the truth. His forehead was Botoxed all to hell and his hair had enough product in it to crack in half. And he was wearing a boring suit. He looked like a fake, old, Ken doll. And you know why I am commenting on his appearance at all? Because this is what happens to women all the time, so turnabout is fair play motherfuckers.

Brett: At first I thought there was a fly on my laptop. It was a funny moment in an otherwise unexceptional debate, very unlike Trump/Biden Round 1 which I couldn’t get Emily to watch.

For the record, Emily cooks because after my first couple attempts at dinner I was banned from the kitchen, not because I don’t try to pitch in. Since my cooking isn’t appreciated (aside from grilling and the occasional breakfast), I do the dishes.

I’m still trying to figure out how this post took a hard left turn into politics.