My child is now a member of a blended family. For both my husband and me, who came from unbroken homes, this is new and unfamiliar territory, and I am still struggling with what, exactly, this means. Perhaps this is why it worries me so when my ex insists on pointing out that my husband's daughter is my child's stepsister. Lest I miss the implication, he has gone so far as to say that they are not real sisters, although as only children, they have never known any other kind. The cynic in me can't help but wonder if he will be as adamant about the child now growing in his new wife's belly not being a "real" sister but only a "half".
Though not large by most standards, my family is very close and our daily lives are strongly intertwined. To me, family is not an abstract idea but a very concrete reality. So I worry about how my daughter will perceive and catalog her family as time goes by; in our house we never use the words 'real' or 'step' or 'half' or 'birth'. Although technically correct, they seem emotionally inadequate.
Yet when I think of my own family the lines do blur. Growing up, I never wondered why my mother always referred to my late grandfather as "John". I suppose I should have been shocked the day I answered the phone and heard a voice on the other end claiming to be my grandfather, but somehow the pieces fell together. It wasn't that anyone had tried to hide my grandmother's first marriage and divorce; it just didn't hold much interest for anyone. The man that had treated them badly and then left wasn't family. No one had seen him in twenty years; although both my mother and her sister eventually met with him again before his death it wasn't, for them, a reunion.
Likewise, I never pondered the reason I had an "Aunt Jo" but also had a "Katie". It was my sister who pointed out to me one day that my grandmother had only had two children, and Katie was a family friend and not a blood relative. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention; the story of how Katie came to spend the night one night and never went back home was something of a family legend. But when the family lined up for pictures every Christmas Katie was right there with the rest of us. I don't think I was an uncurious child; it just never occurred to me to question love and why it was there.
Even now, as an adult, the lines in my family are loosely drawn. My family gets together so often with that of my sister's husband's that I have long since given up trying to refer to them as "my sister's husband's sister's family" and settled on "cousins" instead, which according to Webster is a variation of "kinsman" and means "any relative not a mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, or uncle".
And so I hope that my daughter will not measure her family by halfs and steps, but by love. That her family will continue to grow. That for her, too, the lines will blur until they are undetectable, and only the lines which connect us will matter.