Posted on: April 17, 2008
Add Family, Blend Well
What to do when your families are polar opposites
By Mary Fons
CTW Features
I love my family.
There aren’t many of us (I was raised in a single-parent household with two sisters and had exactly two cousins growing up), and there aren’t many people like us, either. My mom is a successful businesswoman and a devoted Francophile; my older sister is a transgendered, lifetime New Yorker; and my younger sister is a graduate student studying arts management who referees roller derby in her spare time. We are a bookish, artsy group.
And then there’s his family: Eastern European, church-going, jokey, and loud and argumentative in that way that European families can be loud and argumentative. For them, all those raised voices are normal; it’s an expression of love.
Bottom line: Our families are very, very different.
Blending these families isn’t just something I think about when I’m doing the seating chart for the big day. My roller-derbying sister might be able to carry on a pleasant conversation with my fiancé’s stern, imposing father over wedding cake, but what about over Christmas dinner? Spending every holiday together isn’t likely, but it’s safe to say that it’ll happen at least a few times in the coming years. And I’m a little worried.
“It is so hard to blend families,” says Eevin Hartsough, a recently engaged New Yorker who has experience in the “Dad, meet my groom’s crazy aunt” area.
Hartsough says that so far, the blending process seems to be going OK, but it’s not always easy. One of Hartsough’s challenges has been adapting to the ways of her fiancé’s Mennonite family. “My fiancé has a much bigger family than I, so that’s one adjustment when I go to visit them. They’re all [very] religious and I’m worried that I’ll colloquially shout out, “Oh my God!” and offend them,” she says. Hartsough adds that though they’ve been doing dinners at each other’s family houses, adjustments still are being made. “His family doesn’t drink, so there’s some concern about that around the wedding,” she says. “I also wonder and worry about how we’ll manage sharing holidays after we’re married, especially with kids.”
What I keep coming back to is this: My family is made up of good people, and so is my fiancé’s. When good people meet other good people, there’s always something to talk about. And besides, it’s totally out of my control what his cousin thinks of my stepdad, right? Since that encounter won’t happen more than a few times every couple years, there’s not much sense in losing sleep over it.
That seating chart, on the other hand …
