Tag Archives: blended families

The Cakes That Bind Us

The Cakes That Bind Us

Posted on by • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged , , , , , , • Leave a comment

By Susan Currie

The Cakes That Bind Us Im1

I remember the first birthday I put on for my step-daughter. It started with a cake.

 

My mother always told me my birthday was a celebration for her too. I’d come from her. Neither my son nor my daughter came from my body, because we’re a blended family. They spend weekends, Tuesdays, and week-long interludes during the holidays with their dad and me, and the rest of the week they’re with their mom. We do our best to be as involved as we can, often going all out on holidays and birthdays.

I remember the first birthday I put on for my step-daughter. It started with a cake.

It was the end of a busy semester and my inner pastry chef yearned to break loose. What better excuse—it was my then-boyfriend’s daughter’s birthday. I mused over this cake, carefully constructing it in my mind until I was ready to embark on my great creation. Three towering layers. Devil’s food would alternate with pink and purple vanilla cake. The outer layer would remain snowy white, maybe with some chocolate shavings for elegance.

Only two years out of his divorce, and not a wizard cake-maker, my future-husband’s cupboards were not equipped to handle my project’s needs. I lived between my roommate’s and his place, therefore my cupboards were also barren. He an entrepreneur, and me a broke student, we turned our pockets out to make multiple trips to the grocery store. Cocoa, whipping cream, stabilizers, butter, food colouring, bricks of chocolate, and the list went on.

The tiny galley kitchen afforded me little room to work, his dented stainless steel bowls were not ideal for mixing, and he didn’t have a single mechanized way to whisk the whipping cream. I assessed my tools and MacGyvered to the best of my ability. His daughter looked on with awe.

If I think back now I can only imagine the production I must have put on for my almost seven-year-old step-daughter. The organized chaos of a veteran baker who didn’t have access to a dishwasher: batter splattered spoons set aside and elevated to be used later, whisks whirling and bowls turning in opposition. Items in the freezer, and other items in the oven. A carefully timed cacophony.

“What are you making?” she asked carefully.

“Your birthday cake,” I said.

It had been a year-and-a-half-long budding relationship. Their father had met me two months after his divorce, we’d become friends, and then we had become something more. When he originally introduced me to his children they stormed into his home elated to be visiting Dad, and hazarded me no more than a passing glance and a hello before mutilating the art supplies he’d recently picked up for them. As time progressed I began to appear at more events. I was invited on an outing to see their grandmother. Soon I was accepted as Dad’s girlfriend.

“That’s not my cake. Mom got me a cake. It’s ice cream,” she stated firmly.

“Well, that cake will be for your birthday at Mom’s house, with Mom’s family. This cake is for your birthday with Dad’s family.”

Her eyes lit up. She looked around for a second time her mouth opening slightly and her face changing as the nature of blended family birthdays struck her for the first time, “I get TWO family birthdays?”

“You bet.” I said, and as charming as her excitement was, I was suddenly struck by the enormity of my task. I’d been making a cake for the sheer fun of it, with the excuse of her birthday. Suddenly I realized, this was so much more. I whisked harder.

“And you’re making it?” she said cautiously. We looked at each other.

“Yup. That’s what all this is for,” I said, aggressively attacking the task of hand whipping cream.

A spark lighting in her eyes, she chirped, “Can I help?”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I was making the cake for her. I’d spent hours developing the plans. “I guess,” I said. I relinquished the whisk, and instructed her on how to beat the cream over the ice without it slopping over the sides.

It slopped over the sides.

I showed her how to drizzle chocolate without blotches.

There were blotches.

Soon her brother and father were taking turns with the whipped cream, all of us rubbing our forearms by the time the task was fully accomplished. As our cake stacked higher and higher my future step-daughter and I gleamed with identical maniacal glee.

“It’s huge!” She said, thrilled.

“It is huge.” My vision had been realized, but only kind of. It was gaudy, with a clutter of decorations that veered wildly from my original idea. It tilted ever so slightly. We placed the chocolate initial that I had shown her how to create on the top of the cake, and wrote her birthday message in red gel icing on top. It wasn’t what I thought it would be, but I was slowly falling in love it.

We were finished.

“How are you two going to get this to Granny’s?” her father asked.

We froze.

It’s safe to say that the cake made it to Granny’s. Perched on my lap it was dangerously close to the car heater, the gel icing running until the perky red we’d chosen to write “Happy Birthday” in looked disturbingly like blood. The chocolate initial had condensation on it. Before it was served I carefully did my best to make touch ups, afraid that the little girl who it was intended for would be disappointed. I shouldn’t have been concerned, because when it came time to sing Happy Birthday there she was, sitting at her grandmother’s dining room table—too excited to sit still. She blew out the candles and declared, “Susan made this!” to the room of individuals who I’d later call family, “And I helped!”

It’s four years later, and a week before her eleventh birthday, “Do you know what kind of cake you want?” I ask.

She chews on her lip, “I can’t decide, here’s what I was thinking,” she thrusts her iPad at me and we scroll through images of gummy-bear pool-party cakes, fondant iPad cakes, cakes more complex than the me of four years ago could have imagined—I blame Pinterest.

“I’m not working with fondant,” I say smiling.

“But—”

“No.”

“Okay.”

We scroll together, taking note of the cake elements we like and don’t like before settling on this year’s winner. It’s our family tradition now, we find our cake and we make it deliciously real.

Many years, and many cakes on my step-mom resume, a ring on my finger, and a baking cupboard bursting with supplies, these are only a few of the things that make my family mine. Cakes baked in ice-cream cones, Kit-Kat cakes, dirt cakes: we’ve made them all, together. What my mom said about birthdays still resonates with me, but for our family it’s a bit different, birthdays are another way for us to celebrate our unique way of becoming.

Susan Currie is a stepmother of two living in Vancouver BC.

Sitting with the Loss of My Daughter’s Sisters

Sitting with the Loss of My Daughter’s Sisters

Posted on by • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged , , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

By Melissa Hart

7f047a9c

My mother lost custody of me in the homophobic 1970s when she left my father for a woman. My daughter lost her mother to addiction at birth.

 

At nine, I read a novel in which a boy’s beloved hound dog got mauled by a cougar—ripped open from breastbone to pelvis so that her entrails spilled out and festooned a nearby bush like Christmas tinsel as she attempted to follow her master home. That’s how I felt when my mother and her girlfriend left me on my father’s front porch Sunday nights, and I watched their VW bus disappear down the street for 10 days—like my entrails were cascading from my gashed abdomen, pooling in a pile around my white Keds.

And that’s how I felt 35 years later, watching my nine-year-old daughter say goodbye to her older sisters on our front porch after 24 hours of let’s pretend and coloring books and hiking trails while I wished their adoptive mother a safe journey two and a half hours back down the highway.

My mother lost custody of me in the homophobic 1970s when she left my father for a woman. My daughter lost her mother to addiction at birth. She didn’t miss the parent she’d hardly met. But her sisters with their identical timbre and diction, their shared love for dollhouses and hip hop, their shared trauma—these girls, she missed.

My husband and I adopted her from Oregon’s foster care system. Another family had adopted her sisters—one of them developmentally delayed—and couldn’t parent a third infant with significant medical needs. We agreed to an open adoption, to visits with them when time and schedules permitted. For several years, our meetings consisted of tentative hours at shopping mall playgrounds and children’s museums as we got to know each other, gradually lengthening into daylong playdates and this season, a sleepover.

They tell you that as a parent, you’ll experience all the ages and stages of childhood again vicariously through your kid. I never found this to be true until the moment my daughter stood out on our winter porch with the kitchen vent emanating smells of her favorite macaroni and cheese, and she told her sisters goodbye.

All at once, memory walloped me. The girls clung to each other with goosebumps raised on their skinny arms, called “I love you, Sissy!” with their breath creating smoke flowers in the crisp air. Then, two of them walked to their car and one of them stayed behind, and my insides spilled out.

 *   *   *

Every other Sunday in the eighties, when I stepped through my father’s door, I paused for a moment to take the temperature of the house. Almost always, he sat in his bedroom upstairs paying bills and listening to Vin Scully recap Dodger games on the radio. My stepmother stood in the kitchen describing for my younger siblings the new dessert she’d concocted from crushed Oreos and vanilla pudding or fresh Meyer lemons and cream cheese or bottles of stout poured into chocolate cake batter.

Alone, I sat on the carpet in my room and pillowed my head on the bed. No one came in. If I missed dinner those Sunday nights, if I shook my head at my stepmother, mute with sorrow, she returned to the dining room explaining my absence as “hormones.” I listened to my father’s overloud laughter and pressed my hands against my sternum, wondering how on earth to hold myself together for ten days before I could see my mother again.

Losing a family member over and over becomes a Sisyphean series of cruel small deaths. It would have been easier not to visit my mother every other weekend all the years of my adolescence. It would be easier not to see my daughter’s sisters, to let the girls get on with their lives 100 miles apart. But easy isn’t always optimal.

*   *   *

This winter on our porch, I left my daughter waving goodbye to her sisters in the car disappearing down the road. I went into the house and sat at one end of our big green couch, legs splayed inelegantly across the cushions, and reached for the warmest, softest blanket I could find. Then, I waited.

How do you help a child through grief and loss? The first few years, I met the moment of the sisters’ parting with a barrage of what I believed to be comforting distractions.

“Let’s go see a movie!” I told my daughter. “Let’s go to the trampoline park! Get ice cream! Go roller skating!”

She took my suggestions, mute, eyes wide and glittering as an animal’s when it’s in pain, and I congratulated myself for avoiding the chilly disregard of my father and stepmother. But last summer, after a playground visit with the sisters ended much too quickly, she hurled these words in my face: “Mommy, I don’t want to do anything!”

I heard her, and thought with a spinning head, what now?

The Buddhists tell us to sit with our pain, to make friends with it. Three decades ago, I sat with the loss of my mother surrounding me until I fell into bed exhausted. I think about what I wanted from the two parents with whom I lived—not space to process the transition as some obtuse child psychologist had counseled my father. Not even the whimsical desserts that my stepmother presented on her silver cake tray and I failed to recognize as reparation. I would have said no to a trip at the cinema or a game of Monopoly. I longed only for someone to say, “You hurt,” so that I could nod and push my insides back in and soldier on.

So this winter, I sat on the couch with a soft plaid blanket on my lap, and I waited. My daughter walked into the living room without looking at me. She closed the door against the 34-degree wind rattling our front yard cedar and wandered into her room.

I’ve failed, I thought. But she returned. Eyes downcast, she walked over to me and sat on the couch, straddling one of my outstretched legs. Then she crawled between them and lay against my chest. I covered her with the blanket and put my arms around her.

I couldn’t tell her it would be okay. Because it isn’t okay.

But if we can acknowledge that, not okay becomes more bearable.

My daughter and I sat there together on the couch for an hour and just breathed. She dozed a little in the warmth from the baseboard heater. I closed my eyes, as well.

For once, maybe I got it right. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t say anything. I just sat there with her, the slippery tangle of our entrails surrounding us, and held on.

Sky Pony Press will publish Melissa Hart’s debut middle-grade novel, Avenging the Owl, in April. She teaches for Whidbey Island’s MFA program in Creative Writing.

Photo: Andrew Pons/unsplash.com

Blending Families: When My Kids Met Her Kids

Blending Families: When My Kids Met Her Kids

Posted on by • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts, General • Tagged , , , , , , , • Leave a comment

bhjblendingfamilies

You know those swings at the carnival that spin around in mad, sickening circles? You get going so fast that you levitate and you fear, because of some basic laws of physics, that the chains will break and you’ll be hurled off in a straight line to the next county. But you never do. You remain somehow preserved in the rush of that circle, round and round and round. This is how things are.

Summer, as it did last year and the year before it, came again. Spring, if it had a mind to, could just as well launch us into some scary and unknown season, but it, dependably, never fails to slide seamlessly into summer. And with it, summer vacation, the sun, pools and the repetition of contradictory days, boring, fun—days that last forever and end in a blink.

Before this summer, I had met my girlfriend’s kids several times and she had met mine, but this summer brought a whole new experiment. We would for 3 days become a group of 6, going to the Field Museum in Chicago, Lincoln Park Zoo, Navy Pier, and kayaking. What could go wrong except everything?

So, we all wondered in the privacy of ourselves, how is this going to work? One thing is certain. The idea, the prospect of this meeting as an event that loomed in the future, was terrible for all of us. My girlfriend and I were of course concerned about the psychic well-being of our children. I mean, we’re firmly established as crazy in love but how fair is this to the kids? We’re lovers. We’re parents. But now these roles were about to collide into some undefined something and would they be okay? Would they like each other? Are they predisposed to despise each other? Even at the zoo? And even though the kids expressed a willingness to do this, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to surmise that, for them, this whole idea was icky and weird and confusing. The kids they were each about to meet: Who were they exactly in relation to them? I imagined them wondering Will I like them? and, of course, the question that never ceases to haunt us all: Will they like me?

But, as usual, nothing happened that resembled the hopes or fears the 6 of us brought to Chicago. It’s always something else, or maybe, in its own tricky way, it’s always all of it. Meeting new people is as predictable as the seasons. Nervous strangers slip into people with whom you are suddenly laughing and using chalk to draw pictures on the driveway.

At Navy Pier, we bought a 10-Ride Family Pass (awkward). All 6 of us rode the Ferris Wheel, around and around. From way up there, from that perspective, you can see the whole city and the very same city you spent the day walking through is now different and new. With only 4 tickets left, the kids ran toward the spinning swings. My girlfriend and I sat next to a fountain, waiting for them as they stood in the hot sun and long line. It was the first time our kids were gone, together. “I think we’re doing a pretty good job,” she said. I thought so too. The sky was so blue you might cry.

When we finally saw our kids running toward the ride, they had the option to sit in a single swing or a swing built for two. Our two young girls, 10 and 11, sat in a swing for couples. As it began its slow rotation, they looked nervous and by the time it was circling full speed, they were screaming with big frightened eyes. Their initial shrieks appeared to be genuine howls of terror but somewhere in the spinning, in that elusive seamless seam, the screams—like spring sliding into summer—became laughter, though it sounded much the same.

Photo credit: Instagram @mhook 

Juxtapositions: The Blended Family

Juxtapositions: The Blended Family

Posted on by • Posted in Blog • Tagged , , , , , , • 2 Comments

Next in our What is Family? blog series. Your favorite bloggers write about what family means to them. Come back tomorrow for the next post in the series.

0-10I wrote an unpublished novel in which one of the central events is a group of people jumping in a freezing lake in February. That’s my philosophy.

I love that weird jolt I get when I don’t get it. Calls me to attention. Slows me down. When things don’t make sense, they force me to make sense. So wait. People jump in a lake and what’s his philosophy? Exactly. It doesn’t matter what’s on your mind when you trip and fall. Money? Unrequited love? Fundamental ontology? Nope. Just stick out your hands stick out your hands stick out your hands. Brace yourself and protect your face.

As a young man, I was overjoyed when my studies collided with the likes of Dada and Surrealism. These art movements spoke my language; I felt as if they validated the operations of my mind. I’ll never forget where I was when I read Pierre Reverdy on the poetic image: “The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be—the greater its emotional power and poetic reality…” Just 24-years-old, I was sitting on a mushroom in a black dream forest and I wept and wept and wept.

I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’m in love with a woman in Chicago, Illinois. Two more or less distant realities. She has two kids. I have two kids. The plot thickens. Say it with me: juxtapositions.

Shall we insert here right near the middle that I make no claims for prudence or being a good parent? I have no idea if I can be what the people call a “positive influence” on my kids. Right now, my 15-year-old son, grounded from all technology for failing Computer Science, is reading the 1981 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Confederacy of Dunces and my 9-year-daughter is flapping her arms and screaming that she’s a bird. They’re interesting little creatures. They are, by most standards, very good people but I’m uncertain as to what that has to do with me. My best guess is that they will go through an early adult phase of resenting me for being cool and distant and, as people do, will eventually learn to love me for my flaws through the lenses of their own. Or perhaps they will go to prison because, you see, I don’t understand how these things work because I shunned all the parenting books. However, for now, my daughter is a damn good bird.

Because I’m an English teacher and Gwen, my girlfriend, is a high school librarian, we both have the summers off. Do you see where this is going? Are you sure? Gwen is made of sugar, shattered glass, and David Mitchell novels. And my philosophy is jump in cold lakes. Stick out your hands. Protect your face.

So, yeah, we’re mulling over the potential image—the strength and emotional power—created by the juxtaposition of our more or less distant realities. In other words, living together, mixing our kids into a foursome of pseudo-siblings, and exploring that poetic reality for a summer. How would that be, we wonder, for the kids? Undoubtedly terrible. Inescapably so. And yet still, before August expires, perhaps beautiful, as “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”

“It doesn’t terrify you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “But in the best possible way. Do your daughters like birds?”

When I was a very young boy, my mom married a man who had two adolescent sons. They were not nice boys. My dad remarried and I eventually had two half-sisters. They confused me, but I intuitively knew that I loved them. Later, I developed a taste for bourbon and dangerous philosophy. These sentences aren’t linked by causation; they are pure creations of the mind, knocking together to make some sparks.

Gwen grew up in the jungles of Borneo. The water was not cold. There were alligators in the river and cobras on the path. When I imagine her mind, I see a giant chess board and all the pieces’ potential moves in a flash of neurotransmission. We’re an evocative juxtaposition. Distant and true. A car crash. The bliss of collision. What we decide to do next summer will not be found in a book written by experts but rather discovered in a blind leap informed by intuitive vision. Build a fire and look up. Look for shooting stars.

Our two young girls have yellow hair and are separated in age by less than a year. The most curious thing to me? When their eyes meet. Who will they see? And then juxtaposed, distant and true, who? Who will they be?

Art: René Magritte, The Lovers, 1928