Listen to this story:
“The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.”
Heinrich der Glîchezære, 1180
Pastor Linda called all the children up to the front just as she did every week before sending us off to Sunday school in the back. “How was everyone’s week? Does anyone have anything they’d like to share?”
Sunday mornings at the United Church — and the Palm Sundays, Christmas pageants, tiny cups of wine that is really juice and the little cubes of bread that went with them — were the most culturally explicit parts of my early childhood. As a second and third generation white Canadian, it didn’t feel like I had a culture. For me, church was just a weekend activity.
I remember sitting on the hard, wooden steps to the stage, and staring out at the congregation. My small but powerful three-year-old voice broke the silence to answer Pastor Linda’s question, “My mom and dad don’t live together anymore!”
My mother recalls being mortified when I said this. For me, it was the beginning of processing my new identity as a child of divorce, something that would change the way people saw me and how I saw myself.
I am a child of divorce — the child of a long but failed marriage, of a broken home, of a torn family. My identity lies in this series of events I had no say in. A marriage I wasn’t a part of but a product of. I was too young to remember life when my parents still said “I love you” to each other. I don’t remember when we were a trio instead of two separate duos. I have no memories of a two-parent household. All I have is photos of a life that has never felt like mine.
When I look at old photos, it’s as if I’m looking at what could have been, what might have been, and what never was.
My parents were married for 18 years. My mother is also a child of divorce. As she experienced the fractures and pains of her own marriage crumbling before her, she felt rife with fear — fear she’d repeated the same mistake she watched her parents make more than 30 years before.
In the early 2000s, “divorce” was a bad word. It came with a stigma that caused my mother to feel like she had failed.
With a two-and-a-half-year-old asleep down the hall, my mother worried about how she would support the two of us. The ceiling she stared at as she lay in bed would soon belong to someone else. She knew there was no possibility of keeping her home on a clerk’s salary. She was terrified to find out what signing the divorce papers would mean, what it would do to the life she’d known for nearly two decades.
She recently revealed to me that she experienced thoughts of harming herself at that time. She never made a plan, but knew, if she just didn’t wake up, things would be easier. The sleeping toddler blissfully unaware of how her world would soon change was the only thing forcing my mother out of bed every day.
In the years following the collapse of my family unit, adults started treating me differently.
I wasn’t traumatized; I wasn’t even sad. I had two homes, two bedrooms, twice the number of toys, two birthdays, two Christmases. I missed my mom when I was at my dad’s and missed my dad when I was at my mom’s, but I was easily distracted by toys and my favourite television shows.
Looking back now, I remember grown-ups pitying me when they found out my parents were divorced. I remember feeling confused. I wondered if I was supposed to feel sad. Now I realize how their pity influenced me because, eventually, I began to mourn a life I had never known. I didn’t know what it was like to live with both my parents, but slowly I started to believe my family was a failure.
Around the time my parents separated, between 2000 and 2001, the divorce rate in Canada was about 11 per cent. Over 70,000 couples across the country were getting divorced. Despite the frequency of broken promises between two people, I felt the shame of divorce hanging over my family.
As of 2020, the nationwide divorce rate has dropped significantly to 5.6 per cent of all married couples. COVID-19 may explain this drastic change due to court closures and lockdowns.
When divorce rates were high, so was the stigma. As divorce has become more normalized, the pity for my family and me has gone away. Nobody made a fuss anymore when I said my parents were divorced. Now my confession was often met with “so are mine.”
As a small child, I longed for a sibling — someone to play with, someone to share my struggles with, someone who understood how I felt. With my parents separating so early in my life, there was no time for another child, so I was alone. That was how I often felt. Alone.
My extended biological families are also rather small. On my mom’s side, family get-togethers consisted of my mother and my grandparents. I didn’t come into the world until my parents were in their mid-to-late 30s. On my dad’s side, my uncle’s children were already teenagers, leaving me with no cousins to play with.
I wanted so badly to connect to my extended family and the cultures that were part of my heritage. I had dreamt of the day I would finally visit Holland, the only inherited culture I felt slightly connected to through my maternal grandfather.
My grandfather immigrated to Canada from the Netherlands at 18. His legal name was Johann, but he chose to assimilate into Canadian society and go by the name John. My mother recalls him speaking Dutch when she was a child, particularly on phone calls back home. Over time, with a new wife who didn’t speak Dutch and no Dutch family in Winnipeg, his mother tongue began to fade.
He was forced to renounce his citizenship in order to become a Canadian, he never spoke Dutch in front of me, and we didn’t eat any Dutch cuisine. But I imagined once I was in Holland, I would feel more connected to Dutch culture and heritage. I didn’t know it, but I was searching for something that was missing and something I’d been longing for my whole life: a sense of belonging.
In the fall of 2016, I got my chance to visit Holland. As a recent high school graduate who had dreams of getting out of Winnipeg, I moved to France to work as an au pair. After finishing my stint as a live-in nanny, I travelled to other parts of Europe — including my grandfather’s birthplace where I stayed with my mother’s cousins on a houseboat in Amsterdam.
During my short stay in the city, my cousin Jaap took me to a street market where we ordered some fries. As the Dutch do, he squirted mayonnaise all over them. I’d never seen my grandfather do this; it was a cultural difference I’d only read about. I strolled through the market with a family member I’d only just met a day or two before, listening to a language I couldn’t understand and eating a food I wasn’t familiar with. I felt like any other tourist.
I enjoyed the beauty of the city and its landmarks like the Van Gogh Museum and the Anne Frank House, but I felt no connection to the culture. In a country where people shared my features and my mother’s maiden name, there was no familiarity, no sense of belonging or community. The disappointment I felt was too heavy to shove into my suitcase.
I was too young to understand what I was experiencing, but I know now the heavy feeling came from the absence of feeling like I was part of a community, of something bigger than myself. I was missing a sense of love and belonging, the third tier of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Belonging is a necessity for social beings like us, and the absence of it is associated with depression, anxiety, and suicide.
While I left Holland feeling lost and like I hadn’t found what I was looking for, I was completely forgetting about the community and culture that had already found me…11 years earlier.
On a warm Saturday morning in July, having just finished the second grade, my mother and I were having a tickle fight in my room. We rolled around on my twin bed in our pyjamas, nowhere to be on the best day of the week. I had no idea how my life was about to change.
The tickling stopped for a moment so my lungs could catch up, small chuckles still escaping my mouth as I exhaled heavily. “Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked, looking up at my mother as I lay on my bed.
I’d seen a movie recently where a character hid her boyfriend under the bed or in the closet and was absolutely convinced my mother was doing the same. Sometimes, I’d sneak into her room and get down on the floor to check under the bed or fling open the curtain over her closet. Both spaces were much too small to conceal a human man, but my seven-year-old imagination was sure she was hiding something.
She looked at me for a moment. My mother had dated a couple of men before, but I never met any of them. She was adamant about waiting until the right one so she wouldn’t disappoint me. Maybe she was worried about disappointing me again.
Slowly she said, “yes,” and my question period began.
What’s his name?
Tony.
How did you meet?
Through a friend (they met online).
What does he look like?
Olive skin, slender, short – he’s Portuguese.
Does he have any kids?
Yes, four.
Four kids, two girls, two boys. The youngest is a girl, Emily, who is only a year older than me.
My mother and stepfather had arranged their court-appointed custody weekends to line up. This way they could spend time together without sacrificing time with us. I remember the first time I saw them. It was around Emily’s birthday and Tony was taking her to Toys”R”Us to pick out her gifts.
It’s an image etched into my brain: I can see Tony and Emily standing in the doorway of our tiny home. Emily’s long brown hair draped over her petite frame. She hid behind her father. Tony stood a few inches taller than my five-foot-three mother. He had dark hair, almost black, and dark skin. He didn’t look like anyone in our family. He was interesting.
Emily and I spent the entire night playing with our new toys back at Tony’s condo like we’d been sisters forever. We would spend the next few years of our childhood having sleepovers, making obstacle courses in the backyard, and fighting like sisters. I had someone to play with and someone who shared my struggles as a child of divorce. My wish had come true.
My wish had come true four times, and their names are Amy, Aaron, Joey, and Emily.
On a hot July day, six years later, we officially blended our families in the very church where I had announced my parent’s separation to the world 10 years earlier.
Having both been married before in large ceremonies, our parents opted for a small gathering of just their children, and as I stood surrounded by my siblings and my mother as she said, “I do,” I could feel the gap, the absent space in my heart, close a little.
That night, we celebrated more than the unification of two people; we rejoiced in our big and blended family. We commemorated the moment we each gained permanent family members, new caregivers, supporters, and cheerleaders to walk through life with.
The belonging I found in my newly blended family might be an exception. In her doctoral dissertation “Long-term Impact of Growing Up in a Blended Family,” Dr. Sarah L. Sloan, a School of Behavioral Sciences graduate from Liberty University, reported on research that discovered that children who grew up in blended families have lower family belonging levels than children in two-biological-parent families.
Dr. Sloan also pointed out what I’ve come to know — there hasn’t been much research done on children in stepfamilies.
In 2011, the Canadian Census counted stepfamilies for the first time, despite my stepfamily moving in together back in 2009. By 2021, two-parent stepfamilies made up 4.9 per cent of Canadian Census families, over 503,000. The family dynamics in Canada are continuously shifting, and so is how we define family.
While working as an au pair in France, I was given a week off. My stepfather’s eldest sister and her husband were going to be visiting their second home in Portugal during that time. My mother suggested I visit them. “See more of Europe. Take advantage of this opportunity,” she told me. So, I sent my Tia Helena an email and took off to the Algarve for a week.
I had been homesick in France, realizing how big the ocean was that stood between me and a hug from my mother. I stepped off the plane into Portugal’s humid air and was elated to see my aunt and uncle’s familiar faces waiting for me. They gave me big hugs and all the pain of missing my family vanished. I was safe; I was loved; I was ok.
Our first stop was a mall food court where I had cod fries — a food I’ve eaten at many family gatherings and really enjoy. The crispy fries combined with the shredded cod is a perfect salty combination. I ate pastéis de Nata (Portuguese egg custard tarts), saw décor I recognized from my families’ homes in Winnipeg, and visited beaches I’d seen in their vacation slideshows.
The people did not look like me, they spoke a language I couldn’t understand, and nobody shared my mother’s maiden name, but I felt right at home among them. The language, the food, the culture, it was all familiar. I was in a place where I belonged.
My stepfamily immigrated to Canada in 1966, leaving behind an unstable country under a dictatorship. They longed for a better life, and as my great step uncle expressed, Canada was the place to find it.
Unlike my maternal grandfather, my stepfamily found a way to balance their Portuguese traditions and customs with their newfound Canadian identity. Over the years, they would learn English, my tias would trade skirts for pants, and Canadian foods found their way into recipe books.
After 40 years in Canada, the family held a celebratory party at my tia’s cabin at Falcon Lake, a recognition of where they had been and where they were going. From leaving their home and their belongings to move to a foreign country where they didn’t speak the language, all six of my step grandmothers’ children had built successful and happy lives for themselves. Their identities were completely and utterly Portuguese-Canadian.
The blood in my veins is Dutch, Scottish, and Ukrainian, but if you ask me, I don’t identify with any of them. My cultural identity lies with my stepfamily.
Cultural identity is a critical piece of us that develops as we interpret, take in, and adopt (or reject) the values, beliefs, behaviours, and norms of the groups in our lives. It’s how we decipher and react to situations. One of the greatest values my stepfamily holds is that family is everything, and as part of my identity, I have adopted this value.
Extended families have two great strengths: socializing force and resilience. The socializing force provides children with multiple adults to teach them life lessons. Extended family also means more people to support each other. So, when a child gets sick, a mother dies, or someone experiences tragedy, an entire community is there to catch you.
As the years go by, my mother often reminds me how happy she is that I have siblings now. After both her parents passed away in December of 2020, my mother says sharing the grief and aftermath with her sister was what got her through it. She tells me she’s glad I’ll have my stepsiblings to support and care for me when the day comes that she isn’t here anymore.
When I reflect on the pity I received as a kid from adults who found out my parents were divorced, I have to laugh.
Oh, what a shame it is that I grew up with a bounty of caregivers, advice sharers, and supporters. It’s too bad the year my mother couldn’t afford my school supplies, her then-boyfriend stepped up to cover the cost. Isn’t it awful that my Tia Helena and Tio Jack would take me in when my parents travelled?
A day or two after my grandfather’s passing, our home was stuffed with flowers, cards, and care packages, courtesy of our extended family.
The pity was never necessary.
Being a part of this family has given me a crowd of loyal supporters. It’s taught me the importance of family of any kind. It’s shown me love, not by obligation, but by choice. It’s made me a proud sister and a loving aunt.
What was once a tragic ending between two people became the beginning of a happy story for so many.
I am a child of a blended family — the child of a complicated family tree, of a loving home, and of a loud family. My identity is tied up in these people who love me by choice, in a culture I wasn’t born into but embraced. I was too young to remember much of my life when my mother and I were a duo instead of part of something bigger. Now my memories are full of weekends at the cabin, of happily, chaotic Christmas Eves, of the family I’d always wanted.
As my time in Portugal wound down, I dreaded going back to France where nannying was not going as I had hoped it would. The pit in my stomach grew larger as the hours passed and the inevitable loomed.
I hesitantly packed up my suitcase, wishing to return to the moment I had landed and do it all again. My Tio Jack and Tia Helena drove me to the airport. I rolled my carryon across the parking lot, and through the doors of the airport; it had never felt heavier. Every step felt like a mistake. My feet weighed me down like anchors. I felt a lump in my throat as I struggled to hold back tears.
I hugged my Tio Jack and thanked him for letting me stay. I hugged my tiny Tia Helena, who stands a few inches shorter than me at five-foot-two. We did the double cheek kiss I’d learned from my family as a small child. And like a small child, I was afraid to let go.
My aunt kept her emotions in check, smiling as she told me how wonderful our time together had been. She wished me luck. “Everything will be ok,” she assured me.
When I could no longer hold back my tears, she let go too, allowing the drops to wash over her cheeks. As we stood in the warm Faro Airport, just before security, my Tia Helena, who is now the matriarch of our family, looked me in my eyes and told me the one thing I needed to hear: “I love you.”
As I buckled myself into the tiny airplane seat, I let go of the breath I’d been holding in all day. I knew then no matter where I went, no matter how far, I had all the love and support I could ever need.
