Then Charlie and Alex arrived, Charles in Brittany in August 1995 and
Alexander in Santa Cruz in January 1998.
Now we are a real Brady Bunch, with embellishments. It's not his and hers:
it's his, hers and theirs!
All of the older children latched on to Charlie and then
Alex, and the "family" in the larger, household sense of the term came
together. Charles and Alex do have a lot of advantages: no missing parent,
and four doting elder siblings. What they miss according to Charlie is a
missing parent. He complains that he never receives candy and little
care packages by mail !!!
On the left is our youngest family, in a cafe in Carmel
on Marie-Hélène's birthday in May, 2001.
Below right
is one of the all the children in the family together with Marie-Hélène
on Mother's Day 2001, while she opened her presents. An all too rare
moment when we were photographed almost all together.
While
the household was growing and becoming a complex family, its relations with the
outside world were themselves evolving. The first and most significant
support for the parents was their own parents,
whose support
was key to a successful integration.
And somewhere between the
children, the parents found the time to get married, although they are still
waiting for the honeymoon, especially Marie-Hélène (who has still not seen
Venice ten years later)! We belatedly had Charles and Alexander
baptized in Brittany in August 2004. Things don't
necessarily get done in order in this complicated little world!
During the first three years
(1994-7), until we moved to
Santa Cruz ,
the children melded into a tight little crew. No family is entirely
happy, but we were all close and had a lot of fun, especially after Charlie's (and
later Alex's) arrival created
a common goal for us all.
With our move to Santa Cruz, we became a temporarily
unblended family. The French courts separated us for two years, from
June 1997 through August 1999.
The
crooked moving company that we engaged then refused to move our furniture out to
California. They wanted more money, which we did not have. So we arrived in Santa Cruz short two children and all our furniture!! Not
what you could call a brilliant success, that move!
Alex
arrived in January 1998, cheering everybody up and even prompting Ian to quit smoking
for the second time (the first was from 1984 through 1988). At the
beginning of
2008, ten years on, he's
still not smoking! In short, he's over it.
Nick and Tom rejoined us in August of 1999, with the effect
that again our interpersonal dynamics changed. They are already pretty
hard to keep up with, and the coming and going adds to the complexity, not to
forget the entertainment. The summer vacations
since 2000 have generally seen Daphné and Alban with their dad most of the time, and Nick and Tom
with their mom most of the time. It's a time of R&R for the rest of
us!
Here we all are in the spring of 2001 with the Hanlons in
the Ideal Cafe on the sea front in Santa
Cruz. The household had been together
again for two years.
After we'd been together again for six years, the provisional nature of
families was already upon us.
Nick became the first to move out in the
summer of 2005, and the first to move back in again! He has spent a couple of six-month sabbaticals in
Europe based at his mother's place in Paris. By the end of 2007, Daphné was
talking about moving out herself, to San Francisco, and Tom was
talking about spending time in Paris and living with his mum.
Nick
graduated from high school in June 2004, Daphné in June 2005,
and Alban and Tom in June 2007. In late 2007, Nick, Daphné, Alban
and Tom all
attended Cabrillo, the local junior college, as well as worked part time. They
were all mulling over what they're
going to do next.
Today's frustrations with our willful
if well-meaning adolescents will become tomorrow's regrets as they slip away
from us one at a time into their own worlds.
In the
meantime, WILL YOU PLEASE CLEAN YOUR ROOM!!
