🥴 Stuck in the messy middle part of stepparenting
🐛 caterpillar → ?? 🤷🏻♀️ ?? → butterfly 🦋
We romanticize butterflies. So elegant! So lovely! So magical how caterpillars become these ethereal winged creatures!
We don’t talk much about how hard those caterpillars have to fight their way out of their cocoons. We use fancy words like emerge, as if transformation is graceful and effortless.
As a kid, I used to catch monarch caterpillars in jars, feeding them fresh milkweed until they spun their mint-green chrysalises dotted with gold. As metamorphosis progressed, the green chrysalis gradually became translucent, revealing the distinctive orange and black monarch pattern contained within. Not until the chrysalis was completely clear did the monarch begin the slow, exhausting process of hauling her way out.
What birthed from that chrysalis looked nothing like a butterfly at first. She was an ungainly thing with monarch-colored stubs dangling off a bloated, sluggish body. The poor critter would sit there, heaving and wrecked, sipping sugar water until her contours redistributed into an actual butterfly shape and I could release her back out into the world.
There isn't one part of change that's easy. Not committing to change, not the actual process of changing, not the recovery stage after the change.
They say it takes 5 to 7 years to blend a family on average, and up to 10 (or more) when there's high conflict.
We think this means that one day, after we've put in the required amount of time, we'll wake up suddenly to our beautiful butterfly of a family. We focus on the end result, skipping over what's actually happening during those 5 to 7 (or 10+) years: the messy middle part.
We're living through that messy middle right now as stepparents, and we're living through the messy middle of some serious global growing pains too.
The tumultuous worldwide change we all wish we weren’t living through is only compounded by the tumultuous personal change we're already experiencing in our everyday lives as stepparents.
Like it or not, we are mid-change.
We’ve left the caterpillar stage and cobbled together a protective cocoon as best we can. We haven’t yet arrived at… whatever we’re becoming. But inside that cocoon, fundamental change is happening.
Early April marks the anniversary of my daughter’s dad leaving us about a million years ago. At the time, my life could not have felt more utterly wrecked; my planned future stolen from me. But his departure launched my life forward in so many incredible and unexpected ways that when the next April rolled around I threw a "Thank God Chris Left" party to celebrate him moving out.
There's no way I could've predicted that 12 months earlier while I was collapsed in the middle of the kitchen floor, crying so hard my entire body ached.
Discomfort is part of change. Caterpillars don’t just sprout wings; they dissolve into a puddle of goo before they restructure themselves into butterflies.
Similarly, we need to break down our old definition of "family" before we can restructure ourselves into "blended."
I can’t tell you how long that’ll take — how long the ooey gooey and uncertain part of stepparenting is gonna last. But I do know that sometimes even the most awful-seeming mess can bring about beautifully transformative changes in the end.
🧡🧡
— Maarit.
PS - All of this is why I’m running a 30-day stepparenting gratitude challenge in April. You’ll get daily emails/posts right here. I’ll send more info tomorrow, and we’ll start for real on Tuesday. xo
Thank you !
Well put. (@5)