Blended Families

"Blended families..." Who came up with that pithy term? Not anyone that has tried it, for sure. Blended sounds so calm and cohesive. After all, you blend things together to make them one - you blend two colors to make a new color, you blend ingredients to make a delicious cake or cool summer drink.

Blending a family requires more than just the basic ingredients for most blended recipies. Nuclear families - traditional families - are hard enough. I am not sure what it take to blend a family. Some days, it does indeed feel like a blender has taken over - tossing me around, cutting into each of us, knocking us into each other - but so far, what comes out is not something that looks or feels unified. It feels more like a chopped up mess - ready to be tossed into a salad or some days a hot pan to be tortured some more.

Don't get me wrong, there are moments that the blender takes a break. The times that the attempted blending takes a break and all can settle and even allow the scarred, bruised, blended mess to heal and begin the process of "gelling" before someone comes along and presses that "pulse" button on the blender and stirs it all up again.

Every family has family recipes that get handed down from generation to generation. Grandma's fried chicken; Aunt Betty's coconut cake; mom's apple pie. Recipes are also passed down through our family norms - the way we interact with one another, the way we talk to one another, what is acceptale and what isn't, what and who is valued. Blending families is like throwing all of the recipes in together and hoping the ingredients don't cause a chemical reaction resulting in an explosion.

I suppose the best any of us can do in this world of blending families is to try to learn to respect all of the various components and try not to be the one to push the pulse button on the blender.