The Busy Blended Family

Our family is going througn an extremely busy phase of our lives. While this makes life more peaceful within the house (less time spent at home all together?) -- it causes a lot of stress.

My stepfather is back in college full-time, so he has school and homework. My mother is back in college, taking art classes, so her artwork in progress takes up the entire dining room table, along with her supplies taking up the rest of the room. I'm in school plus playing baseball on two area teams. I also have my social life, or what time is left for it with a steady girlfriend. My step-brother is going to graduate from high school next month, so there are prepations underway for that event and to get him into college. My younger brother is always underfoot saying "play football with me..play basketball with me..play baseball with me..PLAY WITH ME!"

Being busy is a good thing. Useful stress is good. Pressure to meet deadlines causes more little tiffs in the the regular household but even moreso in the blended family household where priorities are even more clearly noticed and filed for future reference.

Blended family offspring tend to keep track and/or score of what is done for each sibling, step or otherwise. Mom swears my brothers and I keep a file with all the dates, times, and monetary amounts spent. She knows it's important to attend our sporting and academic events, and if one is missed, knows the person involved will feel slighted and use that as a weapon in their next argument -- how "YOU didn't even come to my so and so event"..routine.

What can we learn from this? We can learn to be less critical, more tolerant, and to budget our time wisely. We can learn from our sports participation that it's important to be a TEAM, and that there's no "I" in team. We can learn to pull together and support each other family member's activities and enjoy the victories and suffer the defeats together. Sharing joy is twice as good and sharing sadness makes it that much less painful.

So let's try and be more tolerant of each family member's activities and pull together as a team, helping each other instead of hindering or trying to cause guilt from missed activities or other reasons we may feel sleighted because of other family member's activities. This will bring the family closer together and more able to function as a unit -- or a team.

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