Life is a fluid, not a solid. It changes. Be ready for it.
Blending a family of four teenagers, a nine-year-old, a territorial Pekingese, a forty-year-old ex-hippie and a thirty-four-year-old, high-energy saleswoman was a white-water rafting trip without the guide, maps, or life jackets. Things looked so calm when we launched the raft, “Oh, baby, look at the scenery! The sun is shining! This is the life!”
But “Hmm, what’s up around that bend? Geez, this calm little stream can’t turn into a wild river this fast, can it?” And then we saw it. Churning and rapids everywhere. Kat and I steered like mad to direct the raft to calmer waters, but we kept darting into raging whirlpool after raging whirlpool. We tied ourselves in, duct-taped ourselves to the rudder. We had forgotten to read The Art of Hassle-Free Family Blending, and the time to read it wasn’t when we were about to capsize.
We had kids skipping school, smoking, shoplifting, doing things you shouldn’t do until you’re twenty-one, and even then you shouldn’t be doing them. We got to know teachers, neighbors, police, and counselors on a first-name basis. Two of our daughters engaged in a “Who can find the sleaziest boyfriend” contest. They both won. Just as we thought we’d made it through the class 4 rapids, the class 5 rapids appeared. Holidays were brutal — kids with pants the size of the Hindenburg, and my temper nearly as explosive.
Our blended family and marriage spun out of control for two years. In most blended families problems arise when the kids from each household can’t get along. Our problem was our kids got along too well. Kat and I felt outnumbered. We all lived in a state of wince. Yet we Napoleonicly forged ahead, doing things as a family — because that’s what families do. We’d pile everyone in the van and drive the 200 miles to Bemidji to visit Kat’s mom. All the kids had CD players with headphones cranked up to chain-saw level, with a cacophony of rap, heavy metal, and country music. There wasn’t much parent-child interaction those days except “I need more batteries!” At restaurants I’d imagine people whispering, “Isn’t it nice of that couple to take those kids from the juvenile detention center out for lunch?” There were plenty of stretches of calm water along the way, plenty of victories, lots of laughter — but there were plenty of hazards lurking just below the surface.
The term stepfamily has all but disappeared from the American vocabulary; Cinderella, with a stepmother who locked her in the closet and two stepsisters mean as fungus, didn’t help endear the term to anyone. So blended family has become the vanguard term.
Family therapist Ron Deal doesn’t think blended is the singular best culinary metaphor. He suggests some families are “pressure cooked,” where values, traditions, and preferences are forced together under pressure to create a single homogenous dish (at the risk of blowing the top off the pot).
Some families are “tossed,” where the values and traditions of each person and family are thrown into the air with the hopes they’ll land in some form of perfect dish.
Some are microwaved, where the families try to become a “nuke-lier” family in a flash.
Deal’s recommendation is to use the “Crock-Pot style,” where the individual ingredients remain intact, but the juices slowly flow together under low, consistent heat. That’s what we tried to do — but it’s awkward explaining to people you’re a Crock-Pot family. Raising teenagers is a tug-of-war — one that can last years. Neither team is letting go of their side of the rope. Each team is trying to get the other one over the center mark; to see their point of view. There’s a lot of seesawing back and forth. The rope gets stretched to its limit. You are exhausted. You find reserves you didn’t know you had. You dig in your heels. But as a parent you never let go. Even when night falls you keep the tension on the rope because the other team — regardless of what they do or say — need to know you’re there.
And if all goes well, eventually, both sides put down the rope, hug, and celebrate, because it was a battle well fought. No one lost any fingers. Both teams are stronger for what they’ve gone through. It’s worth it — you just gotta rub a lot of rosin on your hands and hold on tight.
We never gave up on our kids or each other or this family we were trying to Crock-Pot together. We marinated our kids in love. We worked. We talked. We sought professional help. We survived, eventually thrived. It’s almost impossible to look at our children now — calmly wielding paintbrushes, mature, alive, laughing — and believe they are the same people. I’m sure they look at us and think the same. We’re not only blended, we’re blessed. We’ll never intermingle DNA, but we’ve intermingled our lives. Now our highest highs come from just being together.
Our intent is to create a family cabin — a retreat to remain in the family for generations. A place with notches on the edge of a door to measure heights summer by summer, fish tales that grow, old wool jackets with petrified sticks of gum in the pocket, funny-shaped rocks on the mantel, standing jokes, cribbage boards with one missing peg. People, children, jobs, and houses may come and go, but we want this cabin to remain a constant.
Our intent, too, is for our kids to take part in the blisters and sawdust of building. Work — so they will feel a part of the cabin and its history. Work — so they can see that this isn’t something that just appears on the shores of Lake Superior, full-blown like Hera from Zeus’s head. Work — so we can spend time together as a family. Work — to learn skills. Work — to get the thing done. And work they do. And do so joyfully. Usually.
Once the rough framework is up, we begin having more and more work weekends. Sometimes all five kids converge; other times just one or two. Some weekends the older two camp at nearby Tettegouche campgrounds with boyfriends. Other times we all camp out on the floor of the unfinished cabin or stay at the Mariner Motel. Cuisine ranges from Subway sandwiches spiced with sawdust to simple meals at greasy spoons that taste like banquets.
Initially they do the standard kid-work: paint, haul stuff, and clean up. They prime and paint siding, scrap out the cabin, clear brush and burn the remains. But the more the kids work, the more they prove they’re capable of skilled labor. Kellie and I lay the tongue-and-groove floor. Maggie drills the beams, installs the metal support brackets, then bolts everything together. Zach drills the vent holes in the eave blocking with a mammoth right-angle drill — the kind that will wrench your arm off if it hits a knot — and installs the vents. Tessa caulks around the windows and rafters. Sarah installs cedar decking. Kids cut and fit the Tyvek house wrap, nail windows in place, split firewood, insulate.
Friends and boyfriends pitch in, too. One weekend Sarah paints a large blue heart on the wall with her and her boyfriend’s initials inside. The next weekend she rollers him out after they break up.
We work at the cabin in various combinations and numbers; sometimes in sevens, other times twos. One night while two-ing it, Tessa and I lie on our backs on the deck on a moonless night, a billion stars punched through the black blanket of sky. The conversation comfortably meanders here and there. She’s the youngest but was pulled ahead in years by the adolescent vortex of four older siblings. Between that and the divorce, a couple of years of her childhood got dissolved in the fizz. When you’re nine and need to pick your way through the flotsam of divorce, you put order in your life wherever you can. That’s hung with Tessa. She is a kid of meticulousness and perfection.
I’ve spent plenty of time forehead-slapping myself and rehashing how I could have done things better through the separation and divorce. But the “Give up all hope of creating a happier past” saying is truth. So we work on creating a happier now. Right now we’ve got it.
The first casualty of divorce is your children’s past. They had a life before the split; there were family trips, funny things said and done, stories of childbirth, goofy first words, memorable first steps. But in order to survive a divorce, to keep the painful parts at bay, the tendency — as an adult — is to not bring up any part of the past, even the good parts. Maybe you’re with family and friends and someone talks about the time Willy put a worm in Trisha’s SpaghettiOs, and one of your kids did something equally goofy, but you keep hushed. Because it was back then. And if it was good back then, what happened to make it not good? And in staying hushed, you’ve robbed your children of their history; of the stories and experiences that made them, them. Unhushing the hush is hard, but Kat and I keep getting better at this each year. Our children deserve a past.
Many are the weeks without children. There are stretches when I spend so many weekends away I feel like Deadbeat Dad; my natural tendency is to point north every chance I’ve got. Kat picks up the slack, and five kids create a lot of slack.
Midway through the first full year of construction, Kat and I discover something about our parenting dynamics. Whenever she’s out of town, working on the cabin or dogsledding or sailing, and I’m single parenting, family life feels subdued and lifeless. Without Kat’s energy things feel out of balance; all of my opaque parenting weaknesses turn transparent. Things don’t feel as fun and full. And I’m a terrible housekeeper. I’ve been banned from the laundry room since I soaked a pair of Maggie’s stained jeans in straight bleach overnight, threw them in the dryer, then opened the door to discover only a zipper, one pocket, and two handfuls of lint.
Without Kat I’m more withdrawn, more likely to spend the evening reading in our bedroom than sitting on the kitchen floor with a bowl of ice cream discussing friends. Things just feel duddy.
And then she reveals that when I’m away she feels the family runs flat. She thinks I’m the spirit maker, the life of the party, the one who keeps things light and in perspective. And it becomes clear that it requires both of us to create a three-dimensional home. I’m the comedian, she’s the counselor. I’m the homework go-to guy, Kat’s the accountant and appointment maker. The kids will talk to her about anything — and when the conversation gets too heavy, I’ll drag it out of the abyss. When you average out Kat’s tendency to worry and my tendency to not worry, fretting finds a balance.
In mid-July of the second summer of building, we head to the cabin with eighty percent of our kids. We’re determined to have a weekend consisting of no more than fifty percent work, with the rest play. We stick ninety percent to our game plan.
That night the cabin actually starts feeling like a cabin — unfinished, yet comfortable. There’s water and electricity. We simply hang out. We are the only animals on the ark; the rest of the world has disappeared. There’s no place to go and no incoming digital signals. The phone has a “don’t touch me unless you’re dialing 911” aura. There are no forms of entertainment except one another. It is a blessing, a slowing down. We play games like Pit and a family favorite called Screw Your Neighbor. We play cribbage and drink gallons of soda. Bowlsful of chips disappear. It’s a slow waltz. We reminisce, cook, read, color, do crossword puzzles, talk. Maggie is learning the guitar, and we fiddle with that.
I lie on the floor amidst my wife and four daughters — Zach is working as a landscaper in Maryland for the summer — and think I should write a book called Alone in the House of Estrogen. Or as Michael Perry, who lives in an equally gender-imbalanced household, writes, “I don’t have a family, I have a sorority.” Yet I don’t feel awkward, uncomfortable, or outnumbered. I feel happy.
The kids roll their sleeping bags out in the little loft of the bump-out, and the slumber party chatter slowly diminishes as they drift off one by one. Life is good.
Even Katie, our old Pekingese, enjoys herself. At home we need to keep her on a chain or walk her on a leash, since her natural tendency is to go in search of the nearby bed-and-breakfast where the housekeeper once fed her an entire ham sandwich. But at the cabin she can wander freely. There’s no way her bowed 4-inch legs can propel her up the steep, rocky driveway onto the hazards of Highway 61. She seems utterly content sniffing around for long-departed deer. And the cabin, sizewise, is more to her scale.
One evening later that summer we get a call from Zach that begins with the words no parent wants to hear: “Now I’m going to tell you something, but don’t panic.” It is in the brief instant between this sentence and the next that imagination breaks the sound barrier. He’s in jail, in the hospital, in treatment, in the army now; he’s tattooed a swastika on his forehead while drunk; impregnated one, two, three girls; become a Moonie; been voted president of the Jeffrey Dahmer fan club.
And then the next sentence comes, “I hurt myself at work . . .”
The imagination shifts to the world of grisly accidents. He’s blind, paralyzed, his entire arm caught in a leaf shredder.
“. . . with a chain saw.”
Lord of terrors, he’s limbless, full of Frankenstein scars, on life support, he’s dialed our phone number with a pencil clenched between shattered teeth!
“But, really, I’m okay.”
“Well, just how okay are you?”
He’s twenty-six-stitches-across-the-knee okay. At the end of a long day clearing a hillside, he’d swung his arm down to rest and the chain caught his pants, then knee, then skin, then tissue. He’s out of work for two weeks. He’s much calmer than either Kat or me. With a light heart he says, “Hey, Daddy-o, now I look even more like you.”
If I were to write a book on parenting, it would be short. But somewhere in the first two pages I’d throw out the idea that the best way to connect with a kid — even one approaching Pluto’s orbit or pacing dents in the floor — is to get away one on one. Not the five-minute, “I need to talk to you in the corner” one on one, but the road-trip kind. No lectures and no agenda. When Zach launched into his calamitous adolescent years — and he was a prodigy at it — we started a tradition of heading to the Boundary Waters to camp and canoe for four or five days. It was just Zach, the black flies, SPAM, and me. The wilderness created a level playing field. We each had a paddle, half a canoe, a pack, and, all too frequently, no idea where we were.
And within that tradition, another tradition was born. He was thirteen. We were sitting on the edge of a lake after a full day of canoeing, and I pulled a couple of cigars from my pack. He went gosh-eyed. We fired them up and decreed any topic was fair game while we puffed. It was man to man. We could talk about women and girls, work and school, secrets, family, friends. No judging, no lectures. What happened on the Gunflint stayed on the Gunflint. Sometimes, even now, even in the big city, even when he’s legal, we have a cigar when life gets hard.
Maybe I started the cigar tradition early, because I never got to it with my father. Pa got up one Saturday morning thinking it was pretty much like any other day, headed out for his weekly game of tennis, and died of a massive heart attack. There are worse ways to go than surrounded by friends you’ve known for thirty years, doing something you love. But better yet, it would have been better not to die so young.
At fifty-eight, Pa was heading for retirement. One of his goals was to move to the cabin he and my mother had bought in Waverly, hang out his shingle, and run for mayor. There was nothing grandiose about the dream or the dreamer — but you could see the arc in his eye when he talked about it.
I never got to say goodbye to Pa. In fact, on an adult level I never really got to say hello. There’s a point in a father-son relationship when it shifts from being an adult-child bond and becomes an adult-adult one. It’s when the faucet that pours out wisdom about marriage, child-rearing, finances, and how to live life is cranked open. And you know that water is safe and pure; it can come from no other source. But I’d been absent. I’d spent five years wading through college, two years teaching in Denver, then moved to the Ozarks in a failed attempt to move back to the land. My time with him had been limited to a quick visit here and there. The faucet had never been turned on.
We were within pitching-wedge distance of having that man-to-man conversation; the ball was heading straight for the hole when it took the worst imaginable bounce and landed in the worst imaginable hazard. Maggie had just been born, and my folks were a day or two away from driving down to the Ozarks to spend a few days. Here is where it would happen — a couple of lawn chairs overlooking Bull Shoals, a couple of cigars, and some “I wanna give you a little piece of advice about that.” But when the neighbors drove up to tell us which day Ma and Pa were arriving (we were without telephone), instead of saying “Wednesday,” they said, “Your father died this morning.” Not having had that conversation with Pa is a regret I carry in my pocket like a sharp stone. I wish I could have cupped my hands under that faucet to take a few deep, long drinks. Had a few puffs on that cigar.
I learned plenty about life from watching the way Pa lived, and a little more after he died. We found a “Code of Life” scrawled on a piece of paper tucked in the back of his desk drawer. It read:
I think, “What better place to rehearse these ideals than the cabin? What better place to practice them than in real life?”
At one point during the project, we take our annual elder-family retreat to Halcyon Harbor, the elder family being my two sisters and their spouses, my mother and her husband Frank, Kat and me. Halcyon is a quirky fairyland resort perched — literally — above Lake Superior. The most notorious cabin is the “Cliff House,” which is cantilevered over Superior on mammoth iron beams. If you cut a hole in the screen-porch floor you could fish for salmon below. You could never, ever build a cabin like that today, but it’s grandfathered in, and there it sits.
Two other cabins are an architect’s nightmare of additions, alterations, and converging rooflines. The cabin we retreat to is the Lake House — the largest, most normal dwelling of the lot. Yet it is far from ordinary. It has twenty-five mirrors and a massive fieldstone fireplace. The bathroom sports avocado fixtures with deco styling. The sink has a molded-in waterfall faucet and, though forty years old, could grace the pages of the most recent Kohler catalog. The toilet — for lack of a better analogy — has a Harley Davidson seat. It is the halfway place where Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey drank themselves to sleep while sojourning to their Naniboujou Lodge north of Grand Marais.
Halcyon is the place where Kat and I would retreat early in our marriage when our lives were in need of mending. We always stayed at The Studio, a small nook nestled in the rafters of one of the larger units. It was here — with fireplace, wide-eyed view of Superior, birdfeeder plunked 3 feet from the picture window — we would retreat to knit our unraveling lives back together. It represented everything we didn’t have — order, innocence, peace.
But Halcyon has a different aura on the elder-family retreat. Everyone is relaxed. Each couple is in charge of one meal, so no one feels overburdened. The screen porch provides the perfect hangout, since half the family smokes and the other half detests it. There is always a plate of smoked fish, caramel corn, or peanuts to munch. Frank wears grooves in the cribbage board. We play Yahtzee, Screw Your Neighbor, “The Dice Game,” and Scrabble into the wee hours of the morning.
With no minors to influence badly, everyone is raunchier. On this particular weekend Kat and I spend a day working at the cabin before driving down to meet everyone at Halcyon. My mother recalls we were going to invite Dick and Jean over for breakfast at the cabin that morning and turns to Kat, asking, “Did you have Dick for breakfast?” My sisters pounce all over that. We howl, tears running down our faces. For the rest of the weekend, no meal can be eaten without reference to oral sex.
It’s a slumber party for old folks. After Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and other family get-togethers, everyone packs up after dinner and heads home. Here we linger, laugh, and lollygag. You get to know family in a different way.
While we’re putting some belated finishing touches on the cabin, four of our kids head for college in a single week, scattering like balls from a Golfing 101 class.
I drive Maggie out to the University of Montana in Missoula, where she’s transferred to finish her senior year in accounting. She likes the West, but I think she more likes the idea of escaping the blur of a blended family in search of some self-definition.
Maggie actually started life in a rustic cabin — a thing that, at the time, we called a house. It was in the middle of the Ozarks, small and built mostly with salvage material from an old Baptist church. There was no electricity, water, or phone, and the road was no more than a couple of passes of a dropped dozer blade. We didn’t last long. Shortly after my father died, we moved back to Minnesota, partly to be with Ma, but partly because we were so ill-equipped to handle the back-to-the-land life.
She was a child born of strong confidence and full throttle, who developed some engine trouble in high school and is now regaining speed. It is this history that sits with us as her Nissan Sentra clicks past mile after mile of freeway, sunflower fields, and mountains. She’s a young woman headed for adventure, yet still my child. It’s not until we cross into Mountain Time that my heart dips a little. She reaches over and adjusts the clock from 10:04 to 9:04. We’ve never lived in different time zones.
Zach, Kellie, and Sarah head in radically different directions (La Crosse, Stevens Point, and Duluth) to pursue their radically different majors: English, interior design, and early childhood education. It’s funny how they all head in such diverse directions on the vocational compass. But they’re each passionate about their choice, and they each make it work in their own unique way.
Tessa becomes an only child, and Kat and I feel like empty nesters since she’s a perpetual motion machine. She works, is in plays and choir, leads music for Sunday night youth services, has a boyfriend. And we realize, life changes; it’s a fluid, not a solid. We need to be ready for it.
As kids strike out on their own, life feels a little hollow. Yet there are constant reminders of the goodness — like the night I was walking through the waterfront area of Philadelphia with Gary, editor in chief of the magazine where I work. We’d taped two television segments for a home improvement show that morning. We’d had an expense account dinner and solid conversation. We’d stopped at a tattoo parlor, where Gary had gotten a heart tattoo with a ribbon across it bearing his wife’s name. As we neared our hotel Gary stopped, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Spike, shut your eyes, take a deep breath. We have full stomachs, meaningful work, and families that love us. Life doesn’t get any better than this. Right here, right now.” That was my tattoo for the night.
