Every weekday afternoon at around three o'clock, Louisa Kenney Bliss '79 looks out the window of her middle school classroom and wonders whether she is doing the right thing. She imagines her children walking from their schools to the town library, where they will spend the next hour doing homework. "Some days it is pouring rain and I can't get there to help them," Bliss said. "That hurts. It hurts a lot."
The implications of her decision to be a working mother are constantly being assessed by Bliss, whose family situation calls for additional introspection. Bliss and her partner, Sam, have lived together since 1991 with five children--her two and his three--from their previous marriages. She teaches middle school science and math, he is a woodworker. They live on a small farm near Franconia, N.H., and share custody of the children with their ex-spouses. "We're making the best of a bad situation," Bliss said. "It isn't always perfect."
Her children, Eban, 11, and Liesl, 9, and Sam's children, Charlie, 11, Annie, 9, and Olivia, 6, have been together most of their lives and have good relationships, Bliss says. Still, they face peculiar challenges. "Sam and I agonized over how our decision to live together would affect the kids," Bliss said. "We decided early on that we would stay in this area so they would have access to all of their parents. If we didn't have the kids, there's a ninety percent chance we would have moved somewhere else."
The dynamics of her family are complex, Bliss says. There is a natural tension between children whose biological parents live in different houses and who must learn to deal with "siblings" to whom they aren't actually related. According to Bliss, "there is a gap" between the children and their respective stepparents that probably always will be there. "Sam's kids don't want to get too close to me because it feels to them like they're betraying their mother. And my kids keep a certain distance between them and Sam. We have stuff to deal with that some families don't," she said.
Bliss says finding time to share with each child is difficult, but essential. "It's really important that [Sam and I] each get time to spend alone with our kids so that it's not always crowd control," she said. "The kids have retained their own identities; they don't always want to have to share their mom or their dad. It's tough for them. I think about what they might be missing; I think about it all the time."
Bliss believes that the children will have special skills and experience as a result of growing up in a blended family, and that may help them avoid poor decisions later in life. "They don't like being in a divorce situation," she said. "We have talked a lot about why our marriages didn't work and what we should have done differently. Maybe [the children] will be more mature about relationships; have a better understanding of what to look for."
The kids also have learned, out of necessity, to be good communicators. "They have to be very clear about what they want," Bliss said. "They have to find a way to express what their needs are, which is not something kids usually are good at. But they do it very well."
A large, blended family "can be a mess sometimes," Bliss says, but she and her partner are making it work. "The boys built a treehouse during school vacation and the girls and I are learning to sew together," she said. "We're not the `The Brady Bunch,' but we're a close family. We're in it together."