About the Show, Nuclear Families...

Traci Dority-Shanklin shares her story of growing up blended in this episode of The Nuclear Families Evangelist.

The Nuclear Families Evangelist is a podcast that debunks the mythologies of biology by exploring the unique dynamics and relationships of blended families. We enlist experts and humor to help unlock the hidden superpower of being blended.

Contact:
Traci Dority-Shanklin: LinkedIn Twitter Facebook
traci@sisupartnersllc.com
website: www.nuclear-families.com

Transcript

Traci Dority-Shanklin: [00:00:00] The Nuclear Families Evangelist is a passion project of mine. I want this podcast to be a place that both informs and shares the stories of blended families. When one in two first marriages end in divorce, most of us have either known someone in a blended family or we were part of a blended relationship ourselves.

That's why I think it's vital for the nuclear families like us to have a place where we can come together and support one another. I wanna help the healing process and change the picture of what makes an imperfect perfect family. I hope that you will connect with the stories with the [00:01:00] guests and with the conversations.

Please like us on social media and share us with your friends if you do. Our blended families and our relationships are more than just simple biology. We are stepparents, stepchildren, step grandparents, half siblings, step siblings, adopted siblings, and foster siblings. For this episode, I thought I'd start by sharing my story.

I am the mother of two adopted children, the stepmother to two stepchildren. I am also a stepdaughter, a half sister, and a stepsister in a nuclear families where there have been multiple divorces resulting in multiple blended families. 

Between my mom and my father, there are seven marriages. I have five half sisters, one half brother. Two step-brothers. [00:02:00] Two stepmothers, one stepfather, and five sets of grandparents. My mother and father's marriage was their second marriage for both of them. Before my dad married my mother, he had two daughters with his first wife, and my mother had two daughters with her first husband. Their daughters became my four older half sisters after I was born.

I'm the only child from my father and mother's marriage. However, my nuclear families did not stop growing there. When I was in the fourth grade, my parents divorced. My father married his third wife, and she became my first stepmother. They gave me my one and only half-brother and added another half sister, bringing that total up to five.

When I was in the sixth grade, my mother married her third husband. They didn't have any children together, but her third [00:03:00] husband became my first and only stepfather. After I graduated from college, my father married his fourth and current wife, and she became my second stepmother. Even though my father and his fourth wife never had any children together, stepmom number two had two sons from a previous marriage.

So I gained two step-brothers in our nuclear families. Now, I only use these terms half and step for you listening so you can follow along and understand the complexities of these relationships. But for me, growing up and still to this day, these people are not my half sisters, my stepbrothers or my half brother. For me, they are simply my brother or my sister. It doesn't matter if they became a sibling by birth or by marriage.

We shared homes, rooms, schools, vacations, and parents. Well, at least one of them. When I was [00:04:00] little, I remember loving a film called Yours, Mine, and Ours. Do any of you remember this movie? Not The 2005 remake with Dennis Quaid and Renee Russo, which was quite good. I'm talking about the original 1968 version starring Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball.

Fonda is a widower with 10 children, and Lucille plays a widow with eight. So their children from these marriages are the yours and the mine from the movie's title. Of course, they resist their attraction to each other at first, and their children oppose the marriage since they're suspicious of their respective stepparents.

Eventually they, along with the 18 children, bond into one big, happy, blended family. That is, until Fonda and Lucy have a child of their very own. [00:05:00] Now enters the our's from the movie title. You don't need to be a therapist to figure out why I related to it. In our family, all of my sisters were the yours and the mine from our parents' previous marriages, and I was the ours from their current marriage.

It was the 1970s and divorce was scandalous. No friends of mine at school or in the neighborhood had divorced parents, let alone parents in second marriages with children from previous marriages. I can remember other kids asking me embarrassing questions about my family. Questions, like, why weren't my sisters spending Thanksgiving with us?

Or why wasn't I going with my sisters during the Christmas holidays? It was hard enough for me to understand why I couldn't go with them. Their questions and their curiosity left me confused, embarrassed, and feeling stigmatized. But [00:06:00] this movie, "Your's, Mine, and Our's", clarified my identity and normalized things I could never explain about growing up blended. 

To some level I continue to repeat this blended story. I've only been married once, but the man I chose to marry was divorced. He has two children from a first wife, so I became their stepmother when they were 9 and 11. Has the geography of my nuclear families made you exhausted? I hope not because there's a little bit more.

When my stepchildren, our children went off to college, my husband and I embarked on a long, arduous eight year journey to become parents. Unlike other mothers, I did not carry my children for nine months, nor did I experience the pain of childbirth. Instead, I experienced a much different kind of [00:07:00] pain in my road to motherhood.

After four failed fertility treatments, we decided to adopt our first child from Haiti. What we thought was going to be a simple international adoption turned into a nightmare. We met our daughter for the first time when she was three months old. But after visiting Haiti six times and jumping through hoops for two years, we finally brought our daughter home with us one week before her second birthday.

When we had given up hope that our international adoption was over. We initiated a domestic adoption and in yet another miraculous turn of events, we adopted our second daughter just two months after we brought our first daughter home from Haiti. Our nuclear families continues to grow. Recently, my stepdaughter, our daughter, gave us a, our very first grandchild.

Technically, I guess you can [00:08:00] say that he's my step grandson, but to me and my husband, there is no yours or mine. He is simply our. Thank you for listening to the story of my nuclear families. Like you, I live and breathe my blended family every day. I am a wife, a mother through marriage, a mother again through adoption, and a daughter from an eccentric family where there are multiple marriages and multiple blended families.

Let's heal together and change the picture of what makes a unique and imperfect family. Perfect. Join us again as we debunk the mythologies of biology with a lot of love, forgiveness, and humor. One conversation at a time. [00:09:00] Sisu Partners, LLC hosts the Nuclear families Evangelist podcast, which contains content discussions that have been prepared for informational educational and entertainment purposes. Only no listener should assume that any discussion on this podcast serves as the recipe of, or substitute for personalized advice from an investment professional or licensed medical professional.

As the information provided on this podcast is not intended to be investment legal tax or medical. The company is not an sec registered investment advisor and does not solicit clients or raise capital for money managers. Sisu partners offer securities through XT Capital Partners, LLC.