My Family Is Blended, Not Broken

For more great parenting contenting from Grazia, follow our new Instagram community @TheJuggleUK

When I was seven years old, my life hurtled dramatically downhill.

‘She’s from a broken home, bless her’, was something I heard a lot growing up and always left me feeling a bit ashamed. Maybe I was a bit broken as well?

Mum died when I was 7, my home life changed drastically, I was very badly mistreated by a woman that came into our lives (yes, it’s not just men who can be bad eggs) and my world was shattered.

With a good councillor, a lot of loving friends, kind teachers and eventually a LOT of will power (or maybe just stubbornness ha!), I rebuilt my life and was able to move on.

By 2010 I was 25 and ready to start my own family. I got married, had my beautiful daughter Darcy and felt like I had won. I had fulfilled that surely universal ambition to have the perfect family. That’s what we’re told, right? That you have a Mum, a Dad (preferably married home-owners with decent jobs and zero baggage) and they have a perfect healthy baby and life happily ever after. Easy!

Except obviously, life has it’s twists and turns and isn’t always as simple as that! By 2014 my marriage was coming to an end and by 2015 I found myself crying in the supermarket because I didn’t feel like I could buy the ‘family size’ carton of OJ, now that it was just me and a confused 3 year old at home.

I’d found myself in a broken home AGAIN! WTF. This was NOT in the master life plan, and I had no idea how to fix it. I did know I couldn’t have a repeat of the past. I would protect my daughter at all costs and she would be at the forefront of my mind when it came to entering the dating pool again…

I did go on a few dates. There were highs (the American who I thought I was in love with and wrote me a song) and lows (the guy who killed 40 pet lizards by putting them in the freezer) and a few in the middle, but none of them felt right, and none of them were solving my ‘broken home’ problem.

Two years went by and I noticed something unexpected. I was ok. My daughter was ok. We had a family size carton of juice in the fridge and that was ok too. Just because our family was small, it certainly wasn’t broken. It was just ours.

Here’s how I got there (the shortened version! I could talk a lot longer on this I promise you). I actually do talk all about this in detail in my book, ‘MumLife’ … so if you want tons of highs, lows and my many anecdotes about motherhood along the way, please do grab a copy!

My tips:

Refocus! Initially, I thought of all the things we now couldn’t do because we were ‘broken’. I thought I couldn’t do a family holiday, or couldn’t manage a big day out with no support. In time, I refocussed to look at what I COULD do. I flew Darcy and I out to Seattle to stay with a mummy friend, I took her on the train to work with me and made it an adventure, I bought us fish and chips for car picnics by the reservoir.

Say Yes! I’m a bit of a hermit so often don’t fancy saying yes to the invite of a walk round the park or to pop in for coffee. However, during that single mum time, I forced myself to say ‘yes’ to all of them! Sometimes I wasn’t in the mood, but I always left feeling better and it filled the time in a healthier way than staying home and wallowing in ‘what ifs’.

Be delightfully selfish! Rejoicing that I had double the wardrobe space now, rather than being miserable there was no man to fill the shelves, was a much more positive way of thinking. I started to enjoy evenings alone after I put Darcy to bed: I had extra-long baths, late nights watching whatever I wanted, and ate anything I felt like. Amazing!

All these things built my confidence and, actually, rebuilt me.

Fast forward four years and life looks very different. I’m engaged and have a second daughter, gorgeous Pearl – I’m part of a blended, not broken, family! I don’t think those things would have come into my life if I hadn’t been in a place of peace and acceptance. I just wasn’t ready all those years ago.

It’s 2021 and society is much more accepting of diverse families, whatever their make-up – unmarried, same sex, multi-racial, it’s brilliant! And it’s great to see that the media, broadcasting, online and commercial space is expanding to include ALL of us too. A perfect example of this is my current project with Haliborange kids vitamins on their brilliant #ItsAllNormal campaign. They’re celebrating my blended family, rather than ignoring it. They want to show there is no ‘normal’, and help everyone to embrace whatever normal looks like for them. I look forward to a world where this isn’t a needed conversation, it’s just THE WAY.

If you are relating to any of this, please know, you can do it. You have the capability to stand up and live your very best life. Your family is not broken and neither are you.

MumLife: What Nobody Ever Tells You About Being a Mum by Louise Pentland (Blink Publishing) is out now. For more info on the Haliborange #ItsAllNormal campaign, head to their Instagram page @haliborangeuk.

For more great parenting contenting from Grazia, follow our new Instagram community @TheJuggleUK