Wedding Cake for Breakfast (7 page)

And, for the record, so would I.

Blending a Family

SARAH PEKKANEN

The first time I visited my soon-to-be-husband Glenn's family home in northern Virginia, two things happened. First, I was awestruck by his parents' spotless basement—it looked like the “after” photo in a
Real Simple
magazine intervention. (In my childhood home, the basement was the place to stuff old suitcases, broken furniture, file cabinets bought with great optimism but never actually used to file a single sheet of paper, and, occasionally, unruly small kids.)

I wandered around Glenn's parents' basement like a tourist in an exotic country, marveling over the fresh vacuum-cleaner tracks in the shag carpet. I peeked into the laundry room: no overflowing hampers or mateless socks lurking around like lecherous men looking for a partner in a seedy bar—just a washing machine that looked, incredibly, as if it had been newly polished. I picked up a formal family portrait in a gold frame, thinking about my own family's sole professional portrait: my brothers had gotten into a fight after the photo shoot, and my younger brother chopped my older brother's head out of the picture. My parents glued it back in, but you can still see the faint decapitation line.

But my husband's family photo looked like it could be the advertising insert that came with the frame. Everyone was smiling and color-coordinated, with no threat of an impending beheading. I set down the photo, walked a few feet away, and then the second thing happened: the glass in the frame spontaneously shattered.

I refused to take this as a sign, but maybe I should have.

As a journalist who'd written for newspapers including the
Baltimore Sun
and the Gannett/
USA Today
chain, I was always taught to look for the telling details—the little moments in life that illustrate a larger truth. And in many ways, the basements Glenn and I grew up with neatly (or, um, not so neatly) summarized the differences between our families—differences the two of us would be forced to bridge as we learned to live together.

It sounds like the tagline for a sitcom: Free-spirited, messy girl meets hardworking, organized lawyer. In fact, there even was such a sitcom—
Dharma & Greg
—though Dharma had a better wardrobe than me, and also longer, skinnier legs (not that I'm jealous, Dharma, you little ho). You'd think the solution would be obvious: Have a few kooky fights, then learn to compromise. Keep our house messier than Glenn would like, but cleaner than I'm used to. Roll our eyes over our differences, but learn to laugh about them. And you'd be right. Except for one thing.

If our greatest challenge during our first year of marriage was simply to learn how to bridge the gaps in our respective upbringings—between chaos and order, aggressive spontaneity and steady routines, serendipity and traditions—our relationship might have followed that script. Our issues would rise to the surface regularly, but always be neatly wrapped up inside half of an hour.

But there was another complication I never saw coming. A surprisingly big one that was just as firmly rooted in the messages we'd absorbed from our families during our upbringings. Before I could enter into our marriage as a full partner with Glenn, and begin to blend our own routines and rhythms, I needed to do something important: I needed to learn how to make the transition from being a daughter to being a wife.

A bit more background about my parents: my mother is the kind of woman who goes out for coffee with the stranger behind her in the grocery-store line; once, when I was a teenager, I opened the door on Thanksgiving morning to discover several hungry-looking marines (Mom forgot to mention she'd phoned a nearby base and invited anyone who wasn't going home for the holiday to pop by for dinner).

For the record, my father isn't quite as social—as a writer, he happily disappears into the solitude of his home office for hours on end—but he's not shy. When I was a teenager, he once hugged me on a crowded sidewalk in front of strangers. “Dad,” I hissed as I steamed beneath a red-hot layer of pubescent embarrassment, “stop it!” He grinned, then shouted at the top of his lungs, “Who are you, kid? You've been following me around for years, eating my food and demanding rides. I don't even know you! Can you get away from me, please?” as people around us cracked up and I melted into the sidewalk.

To say that Glenn's mother is different from mine is to say that George Clooney doesn't have a lot in common with those lecherous pickup artists who hang around seedy bars (but if you happen to have information to the contrary, could you swiftly forward the name of George's preferred bar to [email protected], please?).

Here are a few examples: my mother once served Indian food and Domino's pizza for Easter dinner just to liven things up (or perhaps because she'd forgotten to cook). Glenn's mother makes the identical menu for all holiday meals—butternut-squash soup, turkey and stuffing, broccoli, hot rolls, and that Jell-O thing that no one actually eats—and serves it on her own parents' wedding china. My mom forgets to wrap presents, and occasionally forgets birthdays altogether—she once dropped off a Pepperidge Farm cake with candles on my doorstep by way of apology for missing the actual event. Glenn's mother wraps gifts in themed paper at least a week in advance, and she's a fan of extravagant bows and card-giving holidays. The people at Hallmark practically know her by name.

My mother craves action, arguments, change. She'll eat blueberry pie for breakfast, canvass door-to-door for politicians (though she has switched political parties twice in the past ten years), and at the last wedding she attended, she ended up on the dance floor with a group of bridesmaids, waving around her arms and screeching the lyrics to “It's Raining Men.”

When I was born, the lone girl sandwiched between two boys, my mother thought she'd created a built-in best friend—a daughter who would be just like her. Evidence seemed to support her assumption: We look strikingly similar, and our voices confuse even my father on the telephone. We have the same straight brownish-blond hair (now aided by Clairol), and we both often laugh so hard that we cry.

And yet, on the inside, we're opposites in many ways. I'm not antisocial, but if I'm around too many strong emotions and conversations, I absorb them like baking soda soaks up refrigerator odors. I crave patches of solitude as strongly as my mother longs for heated political debates. Oh—and I'm allergic to politics.

“All my friends say you're my Mini-Me,” my mom has said, repeatedly, in a tone that has ranged from wistful to puzzled through the years. “But on the inside, you're your father.”

She'd anticipated more closeness, more confidences, more of a reflection of herself—and yet in a fluke of fate or genetics, everything about us, from the foods we eat to the television shows we like, stretches to opposite sides of the spectrum. Our differences—and, more importantly, our inability to accept them—led to epic clashes during my teenage years. We still hadn't resolved them when I married Glenn at the age of twenty-six.

My mother had immersed herself in helping to plan my wedding, and though we fought over things like her desire to throw me a big engagement party (and my desire not to have one at all), things went surprisingly smoothly. Then came the first year of my marriage. My older brother had been wed a few months earlier, and he and his new bride were living in Massachusetts, a ten-hour drive from my parents' home in Maryland. My younger brother had just moved away to live in New Orleans. Everything was changing.

Now that I have three kids of my own, I can look back and imagine what that stretch of time must have felt like for my mother. She was adrift, unmoored. She'd devoted her life to raising us kids—she was the one who piled all of the neighborhood children into her beat-up station wagon to take us on whimsical adventures, like racing up the steps to the top of the Washington Monument (back when they used to let you do that). Sure, she didn't do much cooking or cleaning—those weren't her priorities as a homemaker—but she spent lots of time with us kids.

I think she was terrified that it was all about to crash to an end—that I'd be swallowed up by my left-brain husband and my new in-laws with their strange traditions and habits, and then she'd lose her last close physical link to her children. Maybe she thought that our differences would finally push us apart for good, now that I was married. It's possible she was secretly worried that I might actually fit better into a family that was slightly less . . . flamboyant, especially when it became clear that my mother-in-law and I had a lot in common, including a love of reading, chocolate, and traditional meals. And so my mom reacted by trying to hold on as tightly to me as she could.

The most striking sign came when Glenn and I arrived at the airport on the way back from our honeymoon. We were exhausted and jet-lagged. We looked around for his father, who had offered to pick us up. Instead, we saw my mother.

“I missed you so much,” she said as she ran up and hugged me. She seemed near tears.

Missed me?
I thought, blinking in surprise.
But . . . I was only gone for ten days.

Glenn's father showed up a few minutes later, looking just as stunned to see my mother. I didn't know what to do.

“Should I let my mother drive me home and your dad can take you?” I whispered to my husband. His answer was a surprisingly firm: “No.” Glenn sensed what I couldn't—that this was a slippery slope. That if I didn't set boundaries with my mother now, they might be impossible to erect in the future.

There had been little hints that we were heading toward uneasy ground, that my mother was searching for a way to define a new relationship with the married version of me. She lived about a half hour away, yet she'd taken to coming over to our town house without calling first. Not that she wasn't calling, too—she phoned almost every day, then called back if I didn't return her calls quickly. Sometimes her calls came early in the morning, before we'd even woken up

I knew Glenn's instincts were right, so I chatted with my mom for a while at the airport, then got into the car with Glenn and his father. I felt so sad as I watched her walk away alone. I wanted to be in both places at once—to split myself into two—and then I felt a rush of annoyance. I was with my new husband. We were about to walk into our town house for the first time as man and wife. We'd almost certainly see my mother within a day or so anyway; why was she doing this?

Glenn was surprisingly tolerant, but I saw him raise an eyebrow as my mother's voice came across the answering machine again and again, and soon he suggested we set a rule for phone calls: none before 10 a.m. on weekends. My mother, of course, violated the rule about as often as I violated my own curfew as a teenager.

Glenn and I were married in mid-November, and as our first Christmas together approached, tension between my mother and me only increased.

“What's your plan for Christmas?” she asked. It might not have sounded like a loaded question, but its weight would've broken any scale.

Glenn's parents also lived about a half hour away—though in the opposite direction from my parents—so we hatched a plan to be scrupulously fair, since both sets of in-laws wanted to see us. We'd visit both family homes on Christmas Eve. Then, on Christmas Day, we'd drive to one house first thing in the morning, race to the other parents' home for the middle of the day and Christmas dinner, then drive back to the first parents' home for dessert. We'd try to please everyone.

On Christmas morning, we awoke early, packed the trunk of our car with gifts, called our dog to jump into the backseat, and headed out. I think we spent almost as much time on the road as we did at our respective parents' homes that day—especially after we realized we'd left Glenn's father's gift at our town house and had to backtrack for it. At around five o'clock, as we careened around the highway for the third time or fourth, our dog got sick all over the backseat.

We arrived home late that night, grumpy and exhausted, having lost our holiday spirit somewhere on the road. Our car would stink for weeks.

Before we collapsed into bed, I looked longingly at the cozy sofa in front of the fireplace in our tiny living room, imagining another scenario: What if Glenn and I had woken up and come down here, lighting a fire and cuddling on the couch before we headed out for the day? What if we'd taken the time to be a couple before being blended into our families?

That was the moment when I realized I needed to take a stand. I was focusing so much on my relationship with my mother that it was taking away the attention my new marriage deserved. I wanted those kooky fights about cleaning to be the stressors in my marriage, instead of my relationship with my mother.

It was high time, I realized, that I learned to honor myself as a wife as well as a daughter.

It wasn't easy, especially at first. My mother still tried to cross boundaries I wasn't comfortable with, but for the first time, I gave myself permission to gently close the gate in front of her—to make my marriage a priority. I began turning off the ringer on our bedroom phone and waiting a day or so to return her calls. And the strange thing was, the thing my mother seemed to fear the most—that she'd lose me once I got married—never happened. Instead, I stopped getting angry with her. I phoned her because I wanted to, not because she'd already called three times that day. I visited my parents because I felt like seeing them, not out of guilt.

There were still fights and misunderstandings, of course, and times of icy silences and loud arguments—but the year after my husband and I got married, my mother made an incredible suggestion, the sort of spontaneous idea only she could come up with: why not have both families join together for one Christmas dinner?

Glenn and I were nervous at first, but willing to try—and it worked out shockingly well. Despite their many differences, my parents and Glenn's parents actually got along (a few strategically placed glasses of wine and the rapid steering away from any conversations involving politics or religion helped immensely). Glenn's mom brought stuffing and turkey to the meal, and my mom whipped up Tofurky (she was going through a vegetarian phase) and random side dishes like falafel. Glenn and I got to eat dinner without glancing at our watches, worried that we were shortchanging one side of the family.