What the fridge door says about family

The messy magic of blending households.

Yesterday I spent way longer than seems reasonable working on a household redecorating project: rearranging the door of the refrigerator in the kitchen of my new home, where I will live with two of my kids and my new husband.

On first glance, decorating a fridge door seems like a pretty low-stakes, low-skill-required project. It’s basically shuffling around photos and artwork and menu boards and random novelty magnets until everything fits and looks reasonably neat, and if you don’t like how it looks, changing it up again is easy.

But in this case, the project seemed quite a lot more loaded. The home my kids and I are moving into has belonged to my husband Eric for the entirety of his post-divorce life - a period of life that I know, from experience, is full of weight and meaning. His two (now adult) kids lived here half the time until they launched (one away at college, one married) in the past couple years, so - as it does for most of us - the fridge’s surface became a reflection of their family life.

Now, it also needs to reflect my kids’ and mine. As does, of course, the entire house - but I decided to start with the fridge: partly because it’s a lot simpler than hanging pictures, and partly because it’s the one that I think will most quickly help us feel like home.

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Of all a home’s surfaces, the fridge feels like the most honest. Look at my menu for the week, for example, and you can see that I will not be delivering the finest nutrition or culinary masterpieces, but instead, a “Mom just got married and it’s the last week of school” phoning-it-in meal plan (I mean, I literally wrote “breakfast for dinner” and “hot dogs” on the menu days in advance, instead of even pretending that I’m going to make something more ambitious.)

Right now, freshly arranged, the fridge sports tidily displayed photos, grad announcements, artwork, and thank-you notes; give it a week and there will be random coupons and scribbled notes and new invitations stuck right on top of older ones, and the whole mess will likely be ever-so-slightly askew: a true snapshot of family life.

But the honesty and simplicity of a fridge door gets a bit more complicated when blending households. You know that feeling of trying to decide whether your five-year-old’s art-class creation goes in a frame, or gets slipped surreptitiously into the recycling bin? Try making that judgment call for someone else’s kid’s art. Or sorting through the magnets that represent some family vacation that happened before you came along, so you really don’t know how important they may be to everyone involved, or even just one person in the family. Who am I to say what matters enough to make the cut?

Fortunately, none of the “keep it or toss it?” questions are my call to make. Yet at the same time, my kids and I need to settle in and make this place our home, too. So “decorating” the fridge, at least this time around, looked a lot like shuffling and re-shuffling to make everything that used to be there fit, while carrying over our own photos and mementoes. Making space for us, without infringing on the space others have created for themselves. It’s not an easy task no matter how reasonable, kind, and well-adjusted everyone involved is.

In the end, no fridge artwork was harmed. I did a very small amount of judicious culling on both sides, set aside a tiny stack of “not sure about these” items for Eric to go through, and found a way to make a single fridge represent the combined lives of two middle-aged adults and their combined seven children.

”It’s a little more cluttered than I’d like, but I feel like it’ll just have to be this way for a while,” I texted my business partner, Sarah.

“There’s a metaphor in there,” she texted back.

Sarah’s right, of course. My newly-blended household will feel physically and emotionally cluttered for a while, at least. In fact, in some ways combining households is even trickier with so many of the kids already having moved on to their adult lives. Less opportunity to create bonds and monitor emotions; more opportunity for misunderstandings or feeling misplaced.

While being a stepmom to adult kids is very low on physical labor, and more than half my kids have moved out, there are still a lot of implications of moving my family into another family’s space - even if the “space” is mostly emotional.

Mothering little kids was physically exhausting. In mothering bigger kids, the load is mostly emotional. And now, I’m finding myself in the interesting position of both being a stepmother to adult kids, as well as trying to help my adult and almost-adult kids adjust to having a stepfamily. I really have no idea what I’m doing, but it’s worth giving it my best effort to do it well: messy, cluttered fridge door and all.

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p.p.s. Many years ago, I coauthored a book with a bestselling author and professional organizer. Since she didn’t have children and I have, well, many children, I was brought in as the “mom expert” for a book about pregnancy and new motherhood. In her other books this author had a firm no-sticking-stuff-to-the-front-of-the-fridge rule, because she didn’t like cluttered look of it. I can’t remember if that “rule” ultimately made it into the book we worked on together, but I do know I lobbied hard against it. What mother wants to give up that much free vertical surface space for all the detritus of life, I thought? Still, it occurred to me that maybe not everyone likes to use their fridge for this purpose. Where do you stand on the Fridge Door issue?