Unknown Speaker 0:00 Your family is the one place that you're always supposed to belong. But I think most of us know that's not always true. Family is more complicated than that. And the people who make up your family aren't always related to you by blood. In this episode produced by Vanessa Balintec , we'll explore what it's like to grow up in a blended family. When your family doesn't necessarily match the traditional model. How does that affect your idea of belonging as you get older? This is Same Difference. Unknown Speaker 0:37 Every time I get asked about my family, the conversation always goes a little something like this. I have a half brother, three half sisters, a step brother and a full sister. Really?That's complicated? Yeah, you have no idea. My family changed forever. When I was just seven years old. It's always kind of awkward to explain to others that my dad left my mom for another woman, and that the man my mom remarried is someone I don't really get along with. Growing up, I look to my friends who had seemingly perfect families intact, together and normal. I kind of felt like the odd one out. And it's nice to know I'm not alone. About one in four marriages includes stepchildren in the United States, and one in 10 children in Canada are living as part of a step family. Although these figures showcase how the common family dynamic model is changing. What it doesn't address are the fractured relationships, the mixed emotions and the complications that arise when forming a new family from fragments of others. I put out a call on Reddit asking if anyone who had grown up in blended families would be willing to talk about their experiences with me. I didn't expect so many people to come forward, or that the following conversations would feel so therapeutic. To me and many others, this is what being in a blended family was like. Unknown Speaker 2:05 Even just with my mom and stepfather, it didn't feel like a cohesive unit for me or my sister because they weren't even on the same page. They had very different parenting styles. And at the end of the day, my mom would just sort of just really passively go with whatever my stepfather wanted. Unknown Speaker 2:30 Meet Christie. At 40 years old, she spent the latter half of her teenage years and young adulthood growing up in a blended family with her mom and stepdad, and five other siblings from another marriage. Unknown Speaker 2:43 Yeah, the two adults in my life were just kind of caught up in their own stuff. Especially my stepdad having five kids of his own. And kind of fostering a bit of a competitive vibe in our house, between his kids and my mom's kids. It just felt like, you know, I couldn't go to them for anything. So I probably would have said to my younger self find an adult who would be happy to help, whether it's just advice or something simple like that. Unknown Speaker 3:20 For Christie, a big reason why she thinks her childhood turned out the way that is due to her own parents' upbringing. Unknown Speaker 3:28 I think I was quite resentful for a long time, like, why didn't she do this, she should have done that. And my life is very materially affected by things I saw as her shortcomings. But then as I got a bit older, and I understood, like, what her upbringing was like, which really didn't prepare her to be, you know, a really together, stable loving parent because she didn't really have that. Unknown Speaker 4:02 Dr. Murice Foroh, as a clinical psychologist and director of clinical training and research at the family psychology center. I reached out to her because of her 20 years of experience working with families and complex, familiar relationships. Here's what she had to say. Unknown Speaker 4:18 In three categories, attachment, making a connection. Parents, the second would be boundaries and knowing what their role is. That parents be a disciplinarian and not secure. And then the third one would be family relationships and how they're impacted by quickly you know, either parent child relationship or the parents parenting philosophy mental health challenges. We tend to see most at our centre. Unknown Speaker 5:06 My boyfriend and never went through this, his parents are still married. And so sometimes I try to explain to him what his kids might be feeling or what it was like for me. Unknown Speaker 5:20 While Christie tries to figure out how she can leverage her unique experience in a blended family for her own family now, others are trying to figure out how to heal properly from the wounds of the past. Unknown Speaker 5:38 Meet Kaylee, a university student, nanny and preschool teacher all in one. She lived half of her life in a nuclear family household, and the other half switching between her mom and dad's. Her mom moved out and started dating a man who had three children of his own, creating a complex and at times precarious family dynamic for everyone. It was her parents his divorce, that really triggered a change in her life. Unknown Speaker 6:02 I was really angry, I reacted very intensely, very aggressively. My sister and my brother were a little bit more emotional. But I was just in my head, I was just thinking, How dare you like, how could you do this? Freshman year, they just fought all year long. But in my sophomore year, I noticed that my mom just wasn't coming home. And she would like some nights, she would tap on my window, like in the middle of the night or in the morning and like ask me to let her in. So that's when I kind of knew things were going really, really wrong. And I noticed that my mom didn't want to kiss my dad anymore, and things like that. So kind of inklings of just little clues going on. During that first year, first two years, I would say I was kind of going back and forth between my parents because I was just so angry at both of them. And then I would, I would just switch it was, it was really hard. There wasn't a lot of stability. And at my parents at this time, they couldn't even talk to each other, they hated each other. Unknown Speaker 7:12 Kaylee had a rough time trying to reconcile her parents and trying to blend into her new family a few years later. For a teenage girl going through a traumatic event such as this, she did her best to stay strong. Listening to her speak, I was kind of reminded of myself. Unknown Speaker 7:30 I felt like I wanted to just take me and my siblings out of the situation and just let them fight it out on their own. So I kind of stepped up. And I had to kind of take on the roles of each of the parents that weren't in each other's houses anymore. And my family just kind of hated me for it. It was really, really hard like cooking and cleaning and homework and soccer practice and trying to keep everybody together. And they just, they just didn't understand why I felt like I had to do that. Unknown Speaker 8:07 She took refuge in other households where she could be reminded of what a healthy family dynamic was supposed to feel like, even today, I kind of do the same. Unknown Speaker 8:17 When I go over to my boyfriend's house. it's it's different. And it's kind of nice. And it's it's really strange to me that we can all sit in a room together and have like, even both sides of the grandparents. And it's the weirdest thing that he only has one set of grandparents on either side. It's it's just strange. So I think it would be strange if I had a nuclear family. And yeah, I don't think I don't think my family was cut out to be a nuclear family. Unknown Speaker 8:57 I know for me, I always enjoy going to my boyfriend's house or my friend's houses, anything that just resembled something normal. Eating dinner together, watching TV together, doing things together. It's nice being a part of a family that functions well together. In terms of other relationships with people in her family, they were strained. Unknown Speaker 9:20 It does feel like I'm estranged from all parts of the family because another thing with like the blended families too, is that a lot of the elements don't really blend like friends and stuff. So you feel like aunts and uncles and families. It felt like as soon as my mom entered that relationship and started creating these relationships with the other people. It felt like all of our past relationships just kind of dropped away like friends and family. We just stopped seeing them and things like that. Unknown Speaker 9:55 Maurice goes into this a bit more. Unknown Speaker 9:58 If you're in a blended family, that means But one of their own original parents is not there in the home. And so that that's one of the keys in terms of belonging. What are those relationships like. Has that parents passed away? Is that parents, you know, out of their life for other reasons, in their relationships still intact? And do they see them? How do they all the adults get along? What do the new parenting couples have they handle the other parents, it's on the outside of that relationship. And so the adults can do a lot to build the child a sense of belonging within this new structure, which would then also impact the relationships that they have the friends in school and community. But if those adults don't create that structure, and the child has kind of left on their own to either have these separate relationships, or to feel like they've been abandoned by one or more of those caregivers, then that's when we often see difficulties with a feeling of belonging. Unknown Speaker 11:09 Beyond the hardships that she experienced trying to navigate her to different family dynamics. There were still good times. Unknown Speaker 11:16 I feel like I kind of got the best of both worlds. I mean, we had like the kind of nuclear family but we were like a fun nuclear family like, Dad was always a little tipsy and funny. And mom was always shopping and buying us things and stuff like that. And we were pretty normal up until up until Middle School. I think just the stress of everything, the shopping and the drinking just got to them. Unknown Speaker 11:43 Listening to Kaylee talk about her experience growing up in a nuclear family I wish I had the same thing. And realizing that I never fully had that relationship with my dad, once he moved out of my house, made it more clear that that really signified him being out of my life. But what about people who could successfully blinded to their new families, the people who reached out to me often have beans of depression, cheating, alcoholism, addictions, and resentment in a lot of their stories. But Victoria, her experience growing up in a blended family is something I think we all want. Unknown Speaker 12:23 Oh, I absolutely felt like I belonged in both of my families. And I believe that all of my sisters felt that way as well. I mean, part of it might have helped that of the five of us, none of us had the same set of parents. So none of us felt like the odd one out in the family group. Because all of us were odd ones out, we all had a crazy family dynamic. I think that I wasn't alone, and that my siblings all felt equally loved and wanted. Unknown Speaker 13:02 Victoria had that security and assurance that a lot of us never got to have. I was listening to her and I was absolutely encaptured by her experience, because it was so opposite of mine. Unknown Speaker 13:15 I really wanted to share my story because I know that there are a lot of there are a lot of people that stay in unhappy relationships, unhealthy relationships, because they're afraid, you know, they want to stick together for the kids. And they're afraid that you know, a divorce or future blended family is going to you know, really just be awful. And but in my experience, it wasn't. I think that my parents did the right thing by separating, they weren't happy with each other. And it led to such wonderful things. I got so many sisters out of it. I got so many extra birthdays, and extra Christmases and all these cool things that I got to experience that I never would have otherwise. And I think with my own situation with my kids, I have thrived since that relationship ended and I think that my children are the better forward. Unknown Speaker 14:20 I asked Maurice what she thinks is needed from caregiver side in creating a successful blended family. Unknown Speaker 14:27 I think one of the most important things to say to them as well, but it's also not their fault that they're experiencing problems adjusting or the child is that it is an incredibly confusing, stressful time as much as it can be a really lovely beautiful time in their life. Exciting reaching out for support, and coaching and, you know, trying to learn how they're going to deal with these challenges, it doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with them as a parent, that it's really easy to feel guilty. And it's really common to feel like incompetent or afraid to deal with these issues head on. Usually, parents do that face some of the challenges and work through them even making small changes, that it can make a really big difference to the entire family's happiness, as well as. Unknown Speaker 15:34 Victoria chimes in on this too. Unknown Speaker 15:38 I think that what makes a successful and happy blended family is very similar to what makes any family with multiple children happy and successful. I mean, you have to understand what's what works for and what's important to each child. But I think that and ensuring that all the parents involved are on the same page and cooperating and really just putting the children first before their own, you know, grudges is the most important thing. Unknown Speaker 16:19 And there's other complicating factors like sometimes the parent that's new to that child is of a different race or a different religious background or different cultural backgrounds. And then of course, that brings a new layer of complexity in terms of a sense of belonging. And all of these things can be worked through, but it's really depends on the adults and the caregivers involved and how well they can work through them. Unknown Speaker 16:52 After listening for everyone account for their experiences in blended families, it gave me more perspective on my own. Not only was it therapeutic for me to listen to all these different experiences and find differences, but commonalities in them, but it was a way for me to feel like I belonged, that other people were feeling things that I was and I wasn't alone, stranded on an isolated island by myself. I think having someone like Marie's walk me through the different situations and tell me what's going on on the parents side on the children's side. It was really helpful. I'm sure for people out there listening. If you're from a blended family or you're trying to blend. I hope it's helpful too. Whether if you're trying to blend or trying to figure out how to survive, living in a family, that's not the one that you grew up in. Reach out to people that you love, find resources on how to adapt to the situation. And remember that you're not alone. There's other people who are going through the same thing that you are even if it doesn't feel that way. And I hope this podcast episode is a testament to that. Unknown Speaker 18:01 Family, oftentimes the most complex thing ever, and Vanessa Balintec really showed us how no two families are the same. Thanks to our executive producer Emily Morantz, associate producer Manuela Vega, artwork by Ben Shelley, theme music composed by John Powers. I'm your host Gracie Brison. And last but not least shout out to Amanda Cupido an awkward conversation. And remember, fitting in is overrated.