All In The Family

My husband and I have an unusual relationship with his ex-wife (Jo Mama) and her husband (Happy Banker). We like them. No, really. We don’t just pretend to for the sake of the children.

For instance, we’ll all go to the movie together. All ten of us. Or whenever it’s someone’s birthday (not just the kids, but the adults too), we celebrate at one or the other’s house, complete with cake and presents.

We got married a month apart, and we went to the same place on our honeymoon. (Not together, that’s just wrong.)

Last Friday, Nature Boy, my two boys and I were at the high school football game, not to watch football (heaven forbid), but to watch my stepson play in the marching band. We always leave after halftime is over, because who cares about football? Well, my sons do, that’s who. So, they stayed and watched the rest of the game with Jo Mama and Happy Banker. I had absolutely no reservations about leaving the boys with them. (More like, “See ya!”)

And after my own divorce, my ex-husband SportsDad and I remain very amicable. We do what’s best for our children, and what’s best for our sanity. There’s no room for fighting. We’ve got two sons to raise, and in that task we are a team.

I could go on and on with the examples, but the point is, we’re a family. A big, happy, functionally dysfunctional family. And it proves that divorce doesn’t always have to include custody battles, fighting over alimony, and animosity between exes. I know that in some cases it’s inevitable, but we got really lucky.

Thankfully, I learned this behavior from my own parents, who divorced when I was 11. There was never any animosity between them (at least none that I saw). Once they both remarried (a month apart, I might add), they eventually became friends with the new spouses. In fact, my mother and former stepmother actually had a business together for a while. My half-sister Ashley LOVED my mother, and my mom treated her like a princess, even though she was the daughter of my father and his “new wife”.

Even when my father divorced my first stepmother (FlyMom), and later remarried my current stepmother (Honeybee), everyone still loved FlyMom and kept her in their lives. My oldest son spent a week with her and Ashely in Atlanta, going to space camp and just having an awesome time in general.

I’m so fortunate that things have worked out this way, from the time I was a child to the present. Never was this more apparent than at the wedding of Nature Boy and me. Celebrating with us that day were all of our children, our parents, step-parents (old and new), step-siblings and half-siblings.  And of course Jo Mama and Happy Banker were there, even with some of HER family, whom I’ve come to love as well. And everyone got along swimmingly. My enormous family.

My mom summed it up best when she said, “Honey, we don’t subtract people from this family. We just keep adding.”