Blended Families Showed Up For Each Other In Lockdown. Let's Embrace That
This story is part of Black Ballad’s takeover of HuffPost UK, a week-long series by Black women on parenting, family, and our post-Covid future.
The nuclear family is often seen as synonymous with achieving optimal citizen status. Our lives are inundated with references to it: celebrations of marriage, talk of “blood ties”, and images of couples with their own biological children.
I’m certainly not the first to argue against the idea of the nuclear family as the natural pillar of love (see the brilliant US academic Hortense Spillers). We can love and care for biological relatives, of course, but in a rapidly changing society I join many others in calling for an urgent extension of this practice.
Communal living that disrupts the nuclear family has always existed, but many will still find it difficult to imagine this for themselves. However, changes in the home mean that living as part of a blended family is more likely for many of us.
Blended families are nothing new, but living in opposition to ‘the familial ideal’ means positive portrayals of our lives are scarce. Successful blended families are grounded in the love and care of existing children and previous partners – too often, the stigmas surrounding blended families are the product of society’s outdated idylls.
However, as we continue to re-imagine our lives during and beyond Covid-19, the idolisation of the nuclear family is swiftly running out of legitimacy.
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My relationship with my partners’ daughters and their mum is a radical feminist act of solidarity, one I have written about before for Black Ballad. So much of who I am is nurtured by my relationship with these women. While not being related, we have a close bond and their presence is still one of the most unpredictable gifts presented in my life.
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