As an addendum to the previous post (/spirallingly self-obsessed lament) I should add two things.
Thing 1: Starting to blog (or starting to blog again) is the most obvious regression to adolescence
and
Thing 2: The demise of yester-blog is bound up in family drama and return to Horsham drama that I won't address for fear of perpetuating.

But, on the topic of family, here's a piece I'm conceptually working on (which is to say, something I wrote up at midnight on Thursday and may or may not drag out to revise and almost certainly won't submit anywhere, but which at least lets me say I'm "working" - which is also the beauty of a blog, I suppose).

For weeks in advance, I dreaded my high school graduation. Not because it meant the end of an era, not because I’d soon be leaving all my friends and embarking on my first experience away from home, not even because I’d have to give a speech in front of nearly everyone in my home town – in comparison the our dinner plans, public speaking was small potatoes. For the first time, in my entire life, every member of my immediate family – loosely defined, as it has always had to be, to include grandparents, step-grandparents, first and second husbands and third and fourth wives – would sit down at a table together and try their damndest not to kill each other between antipasti and entrees.

As I descended the stage, diploma in hand, and made my way through hoards of giant Irish Catholic and Italian families to my own giant, blended Presbyterian/Jewish/lapsed Catholic/godless one. There were certain potential problems – who to hug first? Easy, my mom was helping her parents to the car, so Dad gets first dibs – that I’ve been capably confronting for nearly all my life, while others – what will my boyfriend’s step-dad say to my step-dad while I’m hugging his mom and he’s hugging mine? – I was facing for the first time, armed only with the lessons I’d learned through fourteen years of joint custody.

As we sat down to dinner in a fancy, albeit slightly mobbish (who but the mafia could hope to understand our family dramas?) Italian restaurant, and then all stood up and sat down again so as my maternal grandmother would not be seated next to my dad’s wife, and then all stood up and sat down again so my left-handed step-father wouldn’t be perpetually bumping elbows with his right-handed father in law, my brother and I – as the only two assembled who really did call all these people “family” – tried to talk loudly enough, despite his stutter and my nerves, to charm our various relatives so no one had to wonder whose leg they were kicking under the cramped table.

With time – and wine, for those lucky enough to be of age, except my dad who doesn’t drink in front of my brother and I and his wife who he doesn’t let drink in front of my brother and I – things got easier and common ground was located, though it tended to revolve around teasing their newly graduated daughter/step-daughter/granddaughter/step-granddaughter/sister/step-sister about the presumably non-existent social life at the elite university she – which is to say, I – was going to attend that August.

By dessert, a wave of comfort (or intoxication) had swept over the group – it wasn’t the kind of thing we’d do all the time – or probably ever again – but it hadn’t been a disaster. Things made a certain kind of sense, and since we all made it out alive we swore Nana and Poppop would never have to pass the bread to my dad’s newest wife again.

That, at least, was certain, when she officially became my dad’s newest ex-wife (four, if you were counting) later that year. Suddenly, the blissfully un-balanced family dynamic was toppled, Dad was a bachelor again, and all those carefully planned “family game nights” (another staple of divorce, like “dad’s house” and “non-custodial parent forms,” that kids with so-called normal families never have to face) would suddenly be unbalanced. Sure, my step-mother and I had never been close, but who was left to field my dad’s suggestions that hairspray was rotting women’s brains and to relentlessly criticize my form when I was doing crunches on the living room floor? Who would Nana have to awkwardly pass bread to now? Who would hang up the phone when my mom tried to call my dad’s house? Who?

As it turned out, though, my dad’s divorce actually brought my family (or what’s left of it) closer together. Instead of a terrifying, once-per-graduation-or-birthday-at-best/worst prospect, family dinners – not just “mom’s side” or “Dad’s house” dinners, but honest-to-God whole-shebang family dinners – have become a reasonably regular occurrence. Sure, we still have some awkward moments – when my mom accidentally told my dad she loved him on the phone, or when my dad regales us with stories about how his girlfriend broke up with him when he asked her sister out – but for the first time in my life, when I say I’m going out to dinner with my parents, I don’t have to specify which ones, and for the first time I can refer to my family without feeling like I’ve slighted one-half of the familial squadron.

Maybe it would have been easier if my parents hadn’t gotten divorced when I was five. And maybe it would have been easier if I’d never had to split my time and my wardrobe between two houses. But sometimes having three parents has some perks, like 150% more funny stories over the dinner table, 150% more embarrassing memories from my childhood told to the boyfriends I bring home, and quite frequently 150% more money slipped covertly into my hand as I bid a fond farewell to my blended family – the folks who put the fun in dysfunctional.