When my boyfriend and I blended our families and traditions, we realized we needed to form new traditions, too

The morning my boyfriend and I met for our first coffee date, we both knew there was something special between us.

We spoke the language of grief, of solo parents, of young widows who’d lost their forever person to cancer. We understood the hurdles inherent in opening your heart after loss and the way heartache and hope coexist in a single breath.

We understood the unspoken things, and when we made the choice, last year, to blend our families, we understood the challenge we were undertaking.

With the goal of building a family of six out of our respective families of three — two adults and four children, ranging in age from 3 to 15 — we blended the things we can see including furniture, kitchenware, bedtime routines, schedules. We also blended the things we can’t see such as rules, values, and most importantly, traditions.

There isn’t always a perfect blend

Some of the traditions were easy to blend. Our sushi Fridays merged with their pizza Fridays and became an alternating schedule of pizza and sushi. Our weeknights watching dramedies morphed into starting the night with a round of Netflix cartoons before bedtime for the littlest kids.

Other traditions — the ones that involve extended family and grief and four children who had to learn resilience too early — were harder. There’s no way to be two different places at once on Thanksgiving. There’s no way to decorate a Christmas tree with ornaments that belonged to their person while lighting a menorah that belonged to ours without unsettling the grief we’ve learned to co-exist with.

When it comes to those traditions, we’ve had to accept that there won’t be a perfect blend, there won’t be a seamless way to shape two traditions into one. We’ve had to realize that we won’t get it right on the first try, or even the second, and we’ve had to compromise, communicate, and forge a way that works for all of us.

Our new family needed more

It turns out, blending traditions isn’t enough to build a family from the ground up. Because the heart and soul of any family lives, often, in their traditions. In the way they celebrate birthdays and special occasions. The way they spend their Saturday mornings and Sunday nights. The way they build a life in the little things that hold the most meaning. To truly build a family that was uniquely ours, we needed to build our own traditions. Ones that were new to all six of us.

Our traditions were small to start: s’mores on Friday nights, Saturday afternoons on the basketball court, weeknights dropping onto the couch to watch Wheel of Fortune — and it’s hard to tell if we’re on the right track. Should we have developed more traditions by now or are we right to hope the traditions will come on their own with time? Are we hitting the right balance of old and new or are we tipping the scales too far in one direction?

The truth is I don’t know, and for our untraditional family, our crew of six which is so intimately acquainted with grief, the answers to those questions don’t matter. For us, the only thing that matters is that whatever tradition we’re honoring—old or new, blended or not, on track or way off the deep end—we do it with an open heart and an eye toward building a family.

A family that’s not mine or theirs, but ours.

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