A Stepfamily Can Rebuild Over Fault Lines of Failure and Loss - Aeon Essays

29.03.2024 20.
52 A stepfamily can rebuild over fault lines of failure and loss | Aeon Essays
A patchwork family
After my marriage failed, I strove to create a new
family – one made beautiful by the loving way it’s
stitched together
by Lily Dunn
Lily Dunn is a British writer and academic. She is the author of the novel Shadowing
the Sun (2008) and the memoir Sins of My Father: A Daughter, a Cult, a Wild
Unravelling (2022), co-editor of A Wild and Precious Life: A Recovery Anthology
(2020), and her essays have appeared in Granta. She lives in the UK.
Edited by Marina Benjamin
R ecently I watched again the classic film adaptation of The Bridges of Madison
County and felt a bolt of recognition at what is known in film circles as the
‘Madison County Moment’. Francesca (played by Meryl Streep) is with her
husband in their Chevy, and her lover is in the pick-up truck in front. She grips
the door handle, her life on a pivot: should she stay or go? Caught between duty
and freedom, she’s in no doubt of the love she feels for Robert (Clint Eastwood),
but to pursue it would entail destroying her family and living with a haunting
regret. However, if she stays, will this passion persist in her consciousness as an
unrealised, unlived life? When young and childfree, it is much easier to break
away from a partnership and start afresh, but those of us with family need to
understand that damage is inevitable, that it’s simply not possible to shake off the
past. ‘No matter how much distance we put between ourselves and this house, I
bring it with me,’ Francesca had told Robert on the last evening they’d spent
together, when he’d begged her to leave with him. ‘And I’ll feel it every minute
we’re together.’ The life that was left behind.
Married to a good man, with two young children, I too, was struck by true love for
someone else. We met at a dinner where I broke my molar on an olive stone. I
caught myself opening my mouth to show him the severed tooth. Parts of my
body were crumbling, I was ageing, time was running out. My diary entries from
the time were breathless with wonder. Whenever he was in the same room, I
simply wanted to be near him. After many years of ambivalence in my marriage,
the clarity of my certainty came as a relief, a profound comfort, restorative in its
https://aeon.co/essays/a-stepfamily-can-rebuild-over-fault-lines-of-failure-and-loss?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=92a33f22de-… 1/10
29.03.2024 20.52 A stepfamily can rebuild over fault lines of failure and loss | Aeon Essays
ease. It helped steady the ground as the life I knew threatened to shatter. I did not
want to destroy my family, but I’d opened the door on what had felt like a cage,
and a broken bird had finally found its wings. It was not possible to shut the door
again, and I did not want to live the rest of my life wondering what might have
been. I was well aware of my privilege compared with women in Francesca’s time,
when leaving a marriage entailed losing everything. I was able to take the children
with me.
But this was not the easy road: leaving a ‘good enough’ marriage in the hopes of
creating something better often fails. The foundations of a stepfamily are riven by
the fault lines of failure and loss, divorce or death, with children having no say in
the matter of rebuilding – who did not choose this new family structure.
Constructing a new life from the fragments left behind can feel like trying to glue
back a ceramic vessel that has smashed into a thousand tiny pieces and restore it
to its original form: the contours of the break will always be visible. How you knit
the jagged edges of two broken families and make it work brings other challenges
besides, particularly in the West, where we look to the nuclear family and its
image of wholeness and safety as our guide. How this image beats like a heart in
the imagination – the ideal of a natural union, mother, father and biological
children. If my second attempt to create a family has a fighting chance of defining
itself, it must be set free.
T hrough the rosy tint of a new romance, anything feels possible; but add ready-
made children from a previous marriage and the picture distorts. In the early
months, I turned to R and said: ‘You’re not only taking me on, but my children as
well.’ Seven and nine at the time, their presence was intense and vital. He nodded
reassuringly, but I could see the panic in his eyes. When the four of us were
together, they attached themselves to me like Velcro, clinging to my hands and
waist, creating a six-legged creature; they were disruptive over dinner, vying for
my attention. I longed for uninterrupted time to nurture this nascent relationship
without those grasping hands, but I also felt wretched: I was their mother, and
they were children. This man was a comparative stranger. They were still coming
to terms with his explosion into our lives, the result of a decision I’d made for
myself. The weight of my choice and my power to change the course of their lives
was paralysing. I wondered if this selfish act would be a curse, always getting in
the way of cohesion and happiness?
Each time I walked into my ex-husband’s rental home, the smell of his clothes
took me back to our merged lives, the former cradle of us and our family whole.
Also, the oddness of familiar details: pots and pans given as wedding presents;
mugs we’d both drunk from; chairs we had bought one sunny day when the two
of us were hopeful for our future. Later, visiting his new family home, where he
lived with his second wife and toddler, a polished stone elephant, cold to the
touch, transported me straight back to our old family home, with windows open
to birdsong and our children at ease in their neighbourhood: bonds we had
worked hard to nurture. Echoes of the past like ringing bells of memory.
Bittersweet.
I was now in the world of split assets, reduced income, a deep sorrowful pain
overwhelming me each time the four of us were in a room together. The pendulum
of intense mothering, followed by the drag of absence when the children were
gone, our lives unmoored and unstable, all of us caught up in grief. Left alone at
weekends, I felt uptight and distracted, an aching in my bones. Restlessly I kept
looking over my shoulder for something lost, an essential part of myself like a foot
or a hand accidentally forgotten. During this transitionary period my heart was
still marked by the first-time family; it was important to honour it for the sake of
all that was to follow.
I can’t say that R and I got it right, but we took things very slowly, and I followed
my instincts which, in the initial years, were almost entirely aligned with my
children. When R and I finally moved into a house together, I suggested the kids
have their bedrooms on the same floor as ours, and that R take the two attic
rooms for his study. A secret part of me that wanted to tuck him away, for his sake
as well as ours; I wanted to be available to my kids, but I also dreaded them
disturbing his work. We considered getting insulation between the floors.
As the moving-in date got closer, I realised it may be better for the children if I
invited R into the centre of our new home and made our relationship the
children’s central point of navigation. He would have his office on the same floor
as our bedroom, and the children – almost teenagers now – would have the
privacy of the attic. Still, I spent those early years in a state of hyperalertness,
intervening whenever R showed signs of assuming a parental role; I would echo
his commands as if softening them with the cotton wool of my approval.
Whenever I disagreed with him, I rushed in to defend the children, and this made
him retreat into near-silence.
M ost stepfamily literature focuses on stepparents because they are the outliers.
But it is the job of the biological parent to hold all the disparate pieces together:
keeping the children happy, honouring the wishes of the ex-partner, while trying
to keep the new relationship alive. I was anxious if R was left in a room with the
children without me as intermediary. But this attempt to placate and to
harmonise, to resist discomfort, delayed what was inevitable – that R needed a
voice in his own home, and a relationship with my children. Not so much a father
as a father-figure; a constant in their lives, and a positive role model of a very
particular kind. We did not set out to form a stepfamily – we simply fell in love –
and we moved slowly so as not to force things. In fact, it was my children who first
used the term ‘stepfamily’.
Over the past century, families have become more fluid to include non-married
parents, same-sex parents, polyamorous coupling and scatterings of half-siblings,
yet the nuclear family ideal still dominates. In the United States, the term ‘blended
family’ with its positive connotations has slowly been taking over the term
‘stepfamily’, keeping pace with shifting demographics. According to Patricia
Papernow’s paper for therapists ‘Clinical Guidelines for Working with
Stepfamilies’ (2017), in the US 30 per cent of children will spend some time living
in a stepfamily before they reach adulthood; 26 per cent of all marriages include
stepchildren, and about 42 per cent of all Americans have a close stepfamily
relationship, which includes stepparents, children, parents and grandparents.
These figures are significantly higher than in the United Kingdom, where the
2021 census suggests that stepfamilies make up just under 5 per cent of all
families (defined as married, civil-partnered or cohabiting, with or without
children, or a lone parent with at least one child). The term ‘blended family’ has
not yet overtaken the more predominant term, stepfamily, in that, according to
the census, it involves at least one child of the stepfamily being the biological
child of both parents, alongside stepchildren from previous partnerships.
The etymology ‘steop’ in Old English, via German, means ‘orphan’, reflecting that,
historically, most marriages ended because one parent – often the mother, often
in childbirth – died; and stepmothers particularly have taken a bad rap, as evil or
avenging monsters in fairy tales like Snow White and Cinderella. Even so,
‘stepfamily’ feels more synonymous with the reality of starting and maintaining a
second family than ‘blended’.
To me, ‘blended’ suggests a homogenised state of merging; or, more precisely, of

erasing differences and becoming indivisible; the new family, a seamlessly
repaired vessel trying to replicate the original before it was ruptured. This attempt
at merging into one is where so many stepfamilies go wrong. How families deal
with this tension differs dramatically according to what age the children are when
the adults meet, and how active a role the stepparent takes in everyday parenting.
The term ‘blended’ risks denying this tension. The stepparent is a parent and not
yet a parent, the stepfamily is a family but not a family, and one of the base-level
challenges to the stepfamily is that its bonds, at least initially, give primacy to pre-
existing biological connections rather than the romance that birthed it. Blending
is a process that can happen over decades, and sometimes not at all.
Papernow is a leading expert on stepfamilies and the author of one of just a

handful of clinical books on the subject, Surviving and Thriving in Stepfamily
Relationships (2013). She claims that, in stepfamilies ‘straining’ to recreate the
atmosphere of the first-time family, grief is always present. Papernow has long
advocated for more study of stepfamilies and more focused training in stepfamily
therapy. Not least because, at its most extreme, the ‘straining’ can result in what
she calls a ‘scrap and build’ culture, whereby the biological mother or father is
exiled entirely, with the stepparent stepping into the breach. The surname
changes that result can deny a child’s previous identity and erode their
connection with the wider family of grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts.
Historically, popular representations of stepfamilies haven’t helped: the US sitcom

The Brady Bunch (1969-74), with its symmetry of three girls and three boys, a
massive house in the Los Angeles suburbs, and the original separation due to
bereavement on Mike Brady’s side. There’s no mention of what happened to
Carol Brady’s husband. She even denies her stepson’s identity by claiming that
the only ‘steps’ in their household lead to the second floor. This image reeks of
shame and whitewashing, a rubbing-out of the lives that came before, and a
desperate attempt to make two halves a whole. It is a false dream.
Besides, the conventional family structure does not work for everyone. Back in the
day, my ex-husband and I formed a nuclear family, by design. He worked long
hours running his own business and I cared for the children, trying and failing to
keep my career going after my debut novel was published the same year I gave
birth to my first child. I was incredibly lonely, and isolated, living in a different city
from my wider family; plus, I’d bought into ‘attachment parenting’ and was
frightened of sending my children to nursery or asking for external help from
strangers before they were ready. In Matrescence (2023), the writer and journalist
Lucy Jones describes feeling similarly isolated ‘in a white Western culture without
formal rituals and traditions without a culture of asking for and accepting help.’
Formed in response to industrialisation, the ‘nuclear family’ took root when
families migrated to cities and the home became a private and nurturing space,
locking women into motherly roles to raise healthy men who could go out to
work, and healthy women to become their wives. The nuclear family cut women
off from their extended families and the greater community. Privacy, at its best, is
the family’s strength, but privacy can also signal its downfall, setting the family
apart: elevated, rule-bound, protected but enclosed. The carapace can foster
confidence, resilience, safety – but also dysfunction, violence and abuse.
I was flailing in the nuclear family, grasping at alternative ways of living in order to
bridge the gap growing between my husband and me. After dinner, I’d corner him
and tentatively suggest he take a three-month sabbatical; we could rent our
house, hire a camper van, give the kids an adventure, give ourselves the chance to
live more profoundly as a family, with equal responsibilities. But this wasn’t to be.
Our mortgage was too big a burden; the risk of being out of work too great. There
was no wriggle room, no flexibility. I felt trapped by convention in a life in which I
didn’t belong. I had been drawn to marriage for its immovable vows, the idea that
it might create a frame for me to hold on to and force me to grow up. But, also,
because it was what everyone else was doing. These were not solid reasons.
Raised by a single mother, with a father who’d left us to pursue an alternative
lifestyle in a commune, a four-cornered family was not the most natural
configuration for me. Unhappy inside the construct I had chosen, I began to see
other possibilities.
I n Matrescence, Jones references recent research in neurobiology that supports

alloparenting, that is, providing parental care to a child unrelated to you. The
experience of pregnancy is not essential for reconfiguring a woman’s brain into
infant-caring mode, while hands-on parenting can rewire a male brain in similar
ways to how a female brain is moulded through pregnancy and childbirth. Such
evidence supports those individuals wanting to build networks of support for
their children beyond the nuclear structure, but also those struggling to claim
their space as a stepparent. According to Papernow’s research, stepchildren tend
to do better within cultures that are more community centred, such as African
American, Latino and Asian cultures, where childcare does not start and end at
the family’s door, and children are accustomed to being nurtured or disciplined
by grandparents, neighbours and family friends. This extended support
introduces different influences, lifestyles and ways of being to the children,
enriching their life experience, while taking the weight off mothers. Within
African American families, it’s striking that ex-spouses are considered part of ‘a
rich cross-household network of emotional, financial, instrumental, and spiritual
support’; generally, there are friendlier relationships between mothers and the
non-resident fathers, and non-resident fathers are more involved with their
children than their white counterparts.
When my husband and I talked about separating, I told him we could sell the
house and buy two smaller houses next door to each other. We could continue to
coparent, but live apart. I have since discovered a term for such an arrangement –
‘a parenting marriage’. Coined in 2007 by the therapist Susan Pease Gadoua as a
viable alternative to divorce and a form of practical parenting, it describes a
situation where the emotional bonds are dissolved but the parental ties remain. At
the time I suggested it, this seemed impossible: too painful, perhaps, but also too
far from the norm.
Mothers in almost every culture are programmed to bury their needs in the
greater needs of family. Acting on their own desires, following their hearts,
searching out their own private happiness – all of this is still perceived as
transgressive and profoundly selfish. The writer Rachel Cusk is living proof of the
attacks that women face when openly admitting their ambivalence, but she also
nails how ‘othered’ women become when they go against the grain of keeping a
family together, no matter what. In her memoir Aftermath (2012), which
chronicles the wildly unstable weeks following the end of her marriage (she left),
Cusk captures the exclusivity of family – but now from the outside looking in.
She and her children are at a Christmas carol service, and she views the other
families as if:
I were looking in at them through a brightly lit window from the darkness
outside; see the story in which they play their roles, their parts, with the
whole world as a backdrop. We’re not part of that story any more, my
children and I. We belong more to the world, in all its risky disorder, its
fragmentation, its freedom.
Cusk calls out how a two-parent family puts a wall between itself and the world,
and how leaving a marriage hurls you into a rude reencounter with chaos. In the
tentative stage of making a new life in Bristol with my children, I met a woman –
another mother – at a party and told her the reason we had moved from London.
‘I went through a divorce,’ I said bluntly, and she flushed red and our
conversation stalled, as if I was no longer a collaborator – as mother, as wife. I was
hurt and felt ostracised, but I see now that I was a threat to other families
struggling to maintain the nuclear norm; I had broken ranks, trashed the sacred
contract, and made it possible they could too. The author Leslie Jamison writes
beautifully in her memoir Splinters (2024) about the aftermath of walking out on a
marriage with a young child. She captures her ambivalence:
When I was a kid, I liked to write fairy tales with unhappy endings. The
dragon roasted everyone. Or else the princess left her prince standing at the
altar and flew away in a hot-air balloon over the sea. Maybe this was a happy
ending, just a different kind. Not a wedding, but an untethering. Sandbags
hurled over the edge of the basket. Flames blooming under the silk.
More radically, I’ve begun to ask: what if the cracks are the very thing that give a
stepfamily its power, if it’s the patchwork of love, individuality and experience
that make it special? I like the term patchwork family – as opposed to step- or
blended. It makes me think of the loving way we stitch together different lives,
different interests, different needs, and the careful attempt at creating an
imperfect whole. Much like a beloved building that has been altered and
extended over the years, making a point of the demarcation between old and new,
the patchwork family can be a proudly mongrel creation, rather than a seamless
pastiche. A celebration of its past, together with the rich addition of its new
present. The beauty is in the fault lines.
The Japanese art of kintsugi is an apt metaphor here. It is the art of piecing back
together something precious with glue, but not with the intention of making the
breaks invisible and replicating what was – instead, tracing the mended edges
with gold makes a feature of them as they are integrated back into the whole. The
seams are visible as a kind of golden scar that recalls the breakage, challenging
our concept of beauty as something aligned with perfection. Borrowing from the
Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, the imperfection is a new kind of perfection.
Perhaps the ghosts of the original family can be embedded in this new and
beautiful creation. They are the splinters but also the gold leaf in the glue. They
are strong enough to hold the possibilities of the first-time family that were cut
short, and the way that life continues to shine bright in the expressions of the
children who bear the genetic imprint of the absent parent; they are the
connective tissue between two different worlds. This can be celebrated, not
feared. Soon after we met, I took R’s hand and quoted part of the poem ‘The
Summer Day’ (1990) by Mary Oliver: ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your
one wild and precious life?’ We took a risk. And we are still arranging the broken
pieces and waiting for the glue to dry; but the gold is precious and bright.
F ive years into our patchwork family, it is still a work in progress, but the children
have an extended network – a stepmother, two stepsisters and R, adding to their
lives and experience. Not long ago we got a puppy to join our old cat, a mongrel
to fit our crossbreed family who instantly became a shared focus that gave
everyone something to laugh (or scream) over. When we built a kitchen
extension, each of us wrote our names into the wet concrete, forever marking
ourselves, together, into the foundations of our home. These days I can be
upstairs, knowing that R and the children are downstairs and that I don’t need to
intervene; they have formed their own relationships, despite me, and have enough
to talk about, whether it be the dog, or the washing up, or whether it’s time for my
son to take out the recycling. House rules – the details of living – and our crazy
pets have become the bonding glue in the absence of blood.
I know it was right to take the path untrodden, even if I regret the pain it caused. I
can mourn what was lost and what might have been, but not the action that took
me to that fork in the road. Wanting more for myself and not wanting to
compromise by giving in to a life that did not feel right feels like the right path for
me now, but also the right example to my children. Was it worth the sacrifice?
When breaking up a marriage, Cusk tells us, you break more than just your
personal narrative: ‘You break a whole form of life that is profound and extensive
in its genesis; you break the interface between self and society, self and history,
self and fate as determined by these larger forces.’ Knowing that I made the right
decision for myself, and arguably by extension for my children, I have a deep
sense of the responsibility of my actions, like a psychic wound that might never
fully heal.
Jamison writes about hiraeth: a Welsh word that means the yearning for a home
that no longer exists, or maybe never existed at all. But to her it feels more like a
grieving of her marriage, missing not what it had been but what it hadn’t been,
‘what we’d both hoped it would be.’ There is such a primal need to join as one, like
two different substances, poured into a vessel, blending to form an amalgam.
When R and I first met, I sent him a Van Morrison song, ‘Tír Na Nóg’ (1986), and
we often sang it together in the car, as a token of our joint nostalgia at the decades
we missed not knowing each other: ‘We were standing in the garden wet with
rain/And our souls were young again.’ Through that song we were able to imagine
we’d met in a different incarnation, before this life, before these children. We
could return to the land of the young, and never grow old, preserving our love.
But I no longer feel this longing for another life. I think back on Cusk writing
about being relegated to the outside, looking in through a brightly lit window,
and realise that this isn’t a disadvantage. We are alive in the now, in our new
family. Our new reality, with a gash and then a scar – a golden scar – at its centre,
is hard won. We are happy in the home we have built. As Cusk wrote in Aftermath:
‘We belong more to the world, in all its risky disorder, its fragmentation, its
freedom.’ Our beautifully mended pot with its gold and celebration of difference
is also highly functional, watertight and of great use to all.
aeon.co 28 March 2024
https://aeon.co/essays/a-stepfamily-can-rebuild-over-fault-lines-of-failure-and-loss?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=92a33f22d… 10/10

A Stepfamily Can Rebuild Over Fault Lines of Failure and Loss - Aeon Essays

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

A Stepfamily Can Rebuild Over Fault Lines of Failure and Loss - Aeon Essays

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

29.03.2024 20.

Edited by Marina Benjamin

To me, ‘blended’ suggests a homogenised state of merging; or, more precisely, of

Papernow is a leading expert on stepfamilies and the author of one of just a

Historically, popular representations of stepfamilies haven’t helped: the US sitcom

I n Matrescence, Jones references recent research in neurobiology that supports

aeon.co 28 March 2024

You might also like