Stepfamily Evolution
When I was six or seven, I had two pet names for my father – Naa and Ego. Although I don’t remember their origin, I suppose I was following suit from seeing the diminutives my parents used for each other on Christmas gift tags and Valentine’s Day cards. (P.B. and E.S., which stood for something […]
Because my 21-year-old stepson has moved back in with us for a while, I thought this was a good time to re-visit the topic of zigzag evolution. This was the child who moved out of the house before his senior year of high school, which was a huge zigzag at that time. His moving back […]
I think I picked up this term, zigzag evolution, from Patricia Papernow’s foundational book, Becoming a Stepfamily. The meat of this concept is that stepfamilies do not evolve in a straight, predictable, line. Rather, they zigzag, more along the lines of the one-step- forward, two-steps-back analogy. While it’s true that all families zigzag to some […]