Love means never having to phone home. Or something like that.

Nothing quite says the Holiday Season more than quietly weeping into your eggnog while pondering the relatives who choose to reject you. Or is that just me?

Blended families are difficult at best, devastating at worst. The ones that work are pieced together with Prozac, alcohol and little white lies. They are the highly functioning ones. Others, like ours, spiral down into rare phone calls and even rarer visits. I curse the day the Brady Bunch made network television. 

Ours started out with great promise. Me: a new relationship for their father who had been alone for two years. We lived in Hawaii and they lived in California, a not insurmountable trip. My husband flew his son and daughter in mostly annually so he could see them. But they were in their twenties and their father's happiness wasn't on their list of priorities. Rather, getting laid, getting tattooed and getting a degree was uppermost on their minds. With their fathers money, of course. But we were very tolerant. The excuses were myriad: They were young! Of course they were self-absorbed! Everyone is at that age! And blah, blah, blah. A niggling feeling that this wasn't going in the direction Carol Brady would have deemed appropriate.

Time went on. We were somehow carved out as the couple that never received a birthday greeting or Christmas gift. On Fathers Day I would send a cute reminder to give their dad a call as I  just couldn't let that one pass by. And as they got older, the held-out hope that they would mature and join back up with us grew slimmer and slimmer. They chose the wealthier in-laws and the peer group and the calls became fewer and fewer unless money was needed. 

[Eggnog + me  = Weeping]

Retrospectively, we blew it. I cannot imagine my father allowing his three daughters to virtually ignore his 2nd wife, whom he married when we were all in our twenties. He demanded respect for her and we grudgingly gave it at first and wholeheartedly gave it as time went on. We would recognize her birthday, we would send her Christmas gifts. Anything else would have ostracized us, not her. And twenty-something years later, she is a beloved matriarch in our family.

Instead, in our uber-tolerance, his daughter and son were allowed to live outside of the normal rituals of families and that landed us exactly nowhere. The dysfunction peaked a year ago when my husband was hospitalized and almost died. I called his son and begged him to come over to Hawaii. I would fly him over so he could stand at the foot of his fathers bed and give his father that big reason to fight, to live, to survive.

His son said no. And the house of cards we had so gingerly built fell apart. I handed over the communication to his grown children to their Aunt who had flown over to help me. I couldn't, just couldn't deal with them when I thought my husband was dying and they thought I was being overly dramatic. When my husband finally made it home from the hospital, debillitated and weak, I was so angry with his kids I just stopped playing the role of benevolent step-mother and turned away.  

When he regained his strength he had a long talk with each other them. They belatedly apologized to him for not coming to what was almost his death-bed and my benevolence turned to bitterness and reconciliation seemed a long way off.  

2010 has been one of accelerated change in our lives. Medical retirement for my husband, selling the Hawaii house. Moving to a new state. New doctors, new procedures. Watching our loghome being built. Sending my son off to Basic Training. Creating a whole new life in a whole new part of America. Being on the mainland where my step-children live meant the promise? expectation? that they would come visit their father, whom they haven't seen in over 2 years. But while other friends and family have made the trek here, his two children are conspicuous in their absence and the Holidays make it that much harder to bear in between Jingle Bells and gleaming families in commercials lovingly celebrating.

Sometimes it's just too much.

So I weep into my eggnog, 10 years of hurt feelings deciding to surface now. Don't you just love the Holidays? You can only repress feelings for so long before they surface, like pieces of glass working their way through your skin and the only way out is through them. My husband cringes at the debacle which is our blended family and I keep waiting for the tears to stop. Someday this will all be behind us. Someday we will be reconciled. But not now. And now I understand why January 2nd is my friend's favorite day of the Holiday season.

Because that's when it's officially over.