Just another modern American family

Whew. The wedding is over, and it was divine. No gumball wedding here, thank God. I don't think I could have survived another one, especially on so little sleep. The ceremony was flat-out perfect, from the exquisite outdoor setting in a gazebo in the hills of southern California, surrounded by jacarandas, tropical flowers, and ferns, to the elegant sit-down dinner with champagne toasts and strawberry cream wedding cake.

The backstory on this one is more interesting than the details of the wedding. As I posted earlier, my lovely stepdaughter was a bridesmaid. The bride is her half-sister and my husband is the father of them both -- only he didn't know about the existence of his first daughter until she was 13.

The story is - my husband, while in college in California, had a relationship with a woman for a short while, which he broke off when he moved back to Indiana. After a few years back in Indiana, he married Wife 1.0, had a couple of kids, etc., you know the drill. He and I were working at the same company when we met, and one day I noticed a note on his calendar that he was flying out to San Diego. I asked him why he was going there, and he replied "I'm going to meet my daughter." The college girlfriend had been pregnant when they broke up -- and she kept the baby but never told him.

When the girl was 13, her adoptive father and her mother told her the truth about who her father was, and she wanted to meet him, so they tracked him down. She is a beautiful, terrific kid -- even more so because when she met her (bio) dad, she was immediately loving, accepting and mature about the entire chain of events. It was remarkable that at such a young age she was able to handle the upheaval of discovering that the father she'd known since toddlerhood was not her biological father, AND that she had two half-siblings she'd never met.

Couple this with the upheaval of my husband's divorce from Wife 1.0, due in part to Wife 1.0's inability to accept that her husband had had a previous relationship that produced a child, and drunken rage and wild accusation that he may suddenly leave her to go back to California.

Then I come into the picture after the divorce from Wife 1.0. After a couple of years, we marry, and suddenly we are the Brady Bunch with two kids each from previous marriages, working hard to mesh the whole thing together with the fewest possible snags. It's never been easy, but it's been worth it.

So there were numerous players at the wedding: the MOB (who my husband hadn't seen in over 20 years), the adoptive father (who was friendly and kind and just about to break down as he walked the bride down the aisle), my husband, (who was also weepy because he was torn between being happy she was marrying but wishing he'd known about her from the beginning), my stepdaughter (who loved suddenly having an older sister but was freaked out about being a bridesmaid and explaining to everyone in the wedding party about who she was and why she was there), my stepson (who is sweet and loving, but cluelessly focused on keeping his droopy pants above his skinny butt), the now 22-year-old bride (exquisitely balancing her extended family, new husband, and in-laws) and me -- watching the whole parade.

Isn't life strange. What looked like just another wedding was a family drama that you couldn't make up. This is why I can't get into daytime soaps -- what could be more entertaining than real life?