Since my wife and I started the art of family blending a few months ago, we have received advice from numerous sources, some of it more useful than others. And I have to admit some of it has been completely worthless. Anyone who has gone through this will tell you that there is no such thing as a golden secret that will fix the problem. For the most part, the kids are on their own when it comes to their blending struggles because few parents truly understand what the struggle is. All they see is the behavioral issues. The kids also feel like they are alone since the new mom and dad have each other and the kids feel like they have no one. The phrase you’ll most often hear from the preteen and teen aged kids is "no one understand what I’m going through." You get this enough with kids who are not trying to blend but it is compounded in a blended family."

Some of the behavioral issues we see most often with our crew’s blatant disobedience, disrespect, and sometimes raw meanness. The most surprising thing has been seeing this behavior in previously happy, obedient, or otherwise pretty "normal" kids. Last week I had the opportunity to have what I call a "come to Jesus" talk with my son about some behaviors that were evolving into the unacceptable zone. While this is never an easy or pleasant task, it ended up being a very productive experience for me and I think for my son as well.

Our discussion started out a little heated and hostile but I forced myself to not respond in anger or even a raised voice. More than anything I listened and as the Apostle James encouraged us, I was slow to speak and even slower to wrath (like not at all). Wow, the things I learned. I was reminded of the old poem,

The wise owl sat in the old oak
The longer it sat, the less it spoke
The less it spoke the more it heard
Oh why can’t we be like that wise old bird.

At the beginning I was completely focused on the issues at hand, the usual list which included all the dis’s: disobedience, disrespect, disharmony, etc. But as I listened, I began to pay special attention to the items that were emotion packed. I also noticed that they were the issues that seemed to be glossed over or issues that little time was spent talking about. When I paused and asked deep questions about the emotional issues, I was met with either tears or anger. I realized that this was the real issues(s). I let him vent his other frustrations which were in comparison trivial to the emotionally-loaded issues. And when he was finished, I told him I wanted to go back and talk about the issues he was most emotional about.

The more we talked, the more the layers began to come off. At the root I found something most interesting and something that could explain all of the problems our children were having and perhaps maybe explain the problems many blending families face. The problem I discovered is what I have since called Love Mathematics.

In my posting called "The Economy of Love", I explained how we silly humans think that love is a finite resource, which causes us to be thrifty, spending it only where we think we will get the best return. For children of blending families, the equation is even more complicated. In addition to thinking that love is a finite resource we also think that it is only divisible. Children tend to think that if we love one, we out of necessity must love another less. This love division doesn’t apply to everything children love however. Most have the ability to love many different kinds of ice cream but, this broad or multiplicative love gets more difficult to do when children are faced with loving others. Children get very myopic when it comes to best friends, favorite pets, and even inanimate objects like stuffed animals and blankets. Imagine the complexity of the love equation when a child is faced with multiple parents and multiple brothers and sisters? It’s no wonder we see the internal confusion of love and loyalty expressed in anger and aggression as their poor little hearts smoke with passionate activity. If they were automobiles, they would be stalled on the side of the road, hood up and steam pouring out of the engine in sorrow, confusion, and despair.

After an hour of communication punctuated with emotion, tears flowed again through already red eyes as I heard trembling words from my son’s teenage, defiant lips, "I just don’t know how to love two moms I guess." It wasn’t that he doesn’t love his step-mom, I know he does and have witnessed many displays and expressions of love from him to her. Rather, my son struggles with the continual problem of how to solve the painful, long division, love equation. We see him draw nearer to his new family, only to push us away through acts of disobedience and meanness, in an effort to even the love scales or to tip them in the favor of the birth parent that is not present. It became every evident that the same is true with all our children over the age of 8 to some extent. They want to unite and be a family but no matter how they do the long division, they cannot come up with an equation that allows both families to have all the love. Of course the problem is they are using the wrong operant. Love is not a division it is a multiplication. So long as we are trying to divide it someone will always be left out, left wanting, left alone.

The first step in multiplying our love and not dividing it, is to first stop resisting. Stop building a wall and let people in. With children, they need to know and be shown that they can love two of the same things. We can love two sports, two favorite colors, and have two best friends, have two favorite outfits, and two favorite holidays. We should encourage the child to spend time with the other parent or family (so long as it is a safe environment), and most important, negative speaking of the other parent or family within earshot of the child only reinforces that love really is a division. Children learn best and most profoundly by example.

The child and adult that learns to love without restraint will have an abundant life and a life full of love and will never be alone. Division is in reality a subtraction. The more we continue to divide our love we will get a smaller and smaller number until it approaches zero. Of course, division by zero is impossible, and a very sad and pitiful state of all those who end up there after a lifetime of dividing their love.

On the other hand, for those who lean to multiply love, their love number continually gets larger and larger no matter how small of a number it is multiplied (unless of course it is multiplied by a number less than 1, but that is really a division anyway). For these fortunate love multipliers, their love continually expands until it reaches infinity and eternity.