The setting is classic: a perfect fall Saturday morning, sunny but breezy. The field behind the elementary school is ablaze with yellow, green, blue, and white team T-shirts as the six-to-nine-year-olds run like crazy, soccer balls flying everywhere. Parents are out in full force, setting up their folding chairs or blankets near their child’s team, each couple staking out a little piece of property from which to cheer their future Mia Hamm or David Beckham.
Except for us.
We take up an entire sideline all to ourselves. “We” are myself, my husband, my husband’s ex-wife, my husband’s ex-wife’s live-in boyfriend, my ex-husband, and my ex-husband’s fiancée—and “we” are the parents of my daughter and stepdaughter. As our girls practice kicking the ball back and forth, I realize that I’m here with pretty much everyone I’ve seen naked and everyone who has seen them naked over the past decade.
This is our stepfamily and I can at least feel pride that, no matter what our individual gripes and grudges against each other might be, when T. or D. kicks a ball in the goal, no kids have bigger cheering sections than they do.
Just getting the girls on the same team was an exercise in stepfamily machinations. D’s mother lives one town over from us, and while we share fifty-fifty custody of D. with her, D. goes to school in her mother’s town. When soccer sign-up came around, D’s mother registered her locally. Our town has soccer as well, but it’s a twice-weekly commitment instead of just Saturday mornings. T. loves soccer, but she’s seven and she loves art, world peace, bicycles, and Webkinz just as much. The girls are at an age where we don’t want to over-commit them to anything but to just give them the chance to try different activities in a low-stress way. Plus we all work full-time and can’t swing yet another weekday obligation. T. and D. more than anything wanted to be together.
So my husband and I asked his ex-wife if we could list T. as a member of her household to sign her up for the same program as D. She agreed. We signed her up under my husband’s last name to match D., gave his ex-wife’s address, explained to my ex-husband that he would need to pretend his daughter didn’t share his last name for an hour every Saturday, and we were off to the races.
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