Happy families

Buy 2 books and an outfit for presents, throw together a homemade bolognese sauce with rigatoni, green salad with capers, crusty bread and chocolate birthday cake, and you too can fake your birthday girl too into believing that she's had a fabulous, spoiled day. Staying up late to watch 'Wife Swap' together (a family favourite) was an extra license since tomorrow's a school holiday. Nini wasn't bothered for a proper party, and at age 9 falls between playcentre and disco party-markets. We'll ask her friend N over for a cinema trip and a sleepover next weekend as a belated treat instead.

How do you make a happy family? It's a challenge facing all of us with relationships, encompassing the plural families we collect and make when born, growing up, choosing friends, making and breaking alliances and (sometimes) reproducing. Those claiming that their particular family style is the only acceptable permutation among the numerous successful combinations evident in practice must be blinkered.

The blinkered miss out on the enrichment that can come from friends acting as family members, or from the broadened horizons when two parents have different lifestyles, or the adaptability promoted when, over time, family structures fracture then reconstruct themselves in new, sometimes surprising and delightful arrangements.

Astute readers may discern that dynamic changes in family circumstances enter my past and current experience. Behind is a long marriage producing two wonderful children and family-style roles for some close friends in the single-parent family reconstituted when this ended. Over 5 years I had a couple of go's at partnerships but neither were sustained. As the second of these was coming to a close, a casual encounter with a stranger met in a blues bar in a foreign city turned into a love affair more intense, irresistible yet comfortable than any I've felt before. An encounter intended as a zipless one-night-stand turned into something else entirely.

I hauled in my nets as soon as I returned home, making haste to finish with the pleasant boyfriend of whom my kids were so fond. Over the succeeding 4 months, I've revisited and met my beloved's important others (esp. his 18 yr old daughter, J), and he and J have counter-visited to check out Edinburgh and meet my kids too. Both trips helped cement our certainty that the affair was both feasible and fated.

Ahead are the challenges looming to make a new, blended family better than its constituents, joining me and my children in a working, growing enterprise with the man and daughter of my choice. Rationally I should be pessimistic, but somehow I know everything will be fine, and that happiness awaits this new extended family. Wish us all luck, which we surely deserve.