Every few weeks my husband and I find ourselves embracing, or rather, clutching onto each other as we offer ourselves the verbal reassurance and an absurd simplification “We’ve been through a lot”. We share a little laugh-cry moment then get on with our day. This is usually on the heels of the most recent flavor of prolonged negotiation that we have, yet again, felt our way through. It’s a theme that has headlined the voyage of our lives over the last couple years.

Our marriage was a fragile 19 months when the first title waves of pandemic impact started rocking our boat in March 2020. Our blended family of 5 kids were living together under the roof once shared solely by my husband and his kids. The children’s ages lay squarely in the range that (come to find out) were the riskiest for this type of set up – 9, 12, 13, 15, 19. As schools shut down, bedrooms became offices, and the walls started closing in on our jumbled family, we found ourselves clinging to a lifeboat in the type of grand experiment that only the darkest of reality TV producers could conjure up.

Complaints from our crew were both subtle and direct. Parenting choices for other sets of children were questioned. Arms were crossed, dinners set in stony silence. Pets were scapegoated. My daughter was missing most of middle school, for my stepdaughter it was the majority of high school. Privacy was scarce and disappointment was standard issue. As masks were donned on, the kids struggled for air with life outside as well as in.

My husband and I cast our net wide for parental resources to keep us afloat, they were extensive and exhaustive, individual therapies, a marriage and family counselor, podcasts, books, coworkers, friends, vats of wine and nighttime prayers to distant twinkling planets. In my most lost moments, I sent messages out to sea in the form of Google searches: “How to manage passive aggressive teens?”, “How to help blended family develop communication skills?”, “Establishing boundaries for other bio-parents when children continuously vent about stepfamily”, how to maintain patience when you are bailing water daily.       

In all of it, we lost sight of the weight and the impact of the ambiguity in the world around us and blamed ourselves and each other. We lost sight that others were out to sea with us. To a gull gliding above us from a bird’s eye perspective, it was perhaps crushingly obvious, these reluctant explorers were navigating uncharted territory, both micro and macro. It was a journey that there was no map or compass for, only the flickering glow of naïve optimism that could be seen between swells, a lighthouse blinking in and out on a vast horizon. And now, it seems a destination could be in sight, one can only hope. Land ho!

I'll send an S.O.S to the world
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle, yeah 

-The Police, 1979