Christmas is coming. Despite being buried in student papers as the end of the semester approaches, I know this, mostly because Vincent, Henry, and Josie talk about it constantly, wondering when we'll get our tree (soon), if we can put up a garish light display to rival the neighbors' (maybe), and if this might be the Christmas we'll relent and buy that XBox 360 the boys are drooling over (it's not). But even without my kids, I'd know it by the knot in my stomach, the one that comes as I think about how to negotiate the minefields of the blended-family holiday.

Not only do I have a stepson, Vincent, who will split his holiday between two homes, but my parents divorced after thirty years of marriage, and so far, they can't be in the same room together. We work it out: Christmas Eve day dinner with Chip's dad and stepmom; Christmas Eve night dinner with my dad, those of my nine siblings who speak to him, and his extended family; Christmas Day dinner with my mom, my siblings who speak to her, and her extended family. If it's an odd year, as 2005 is, Santa comes to our house one day early so that Vincent, who spends Christmas during the odd years with his mom, won't miss getting to share in his siblings' joy (and rivalry) when it comes to the big present-opening extravaganza. It's not exactly like the fun, noisy family Christmases I had growing up, when the only major changes in our holiday traditions were new additions to our family, but our routine is at least starting to feel familiar.

But that's grown-up life for many of us, and I've come to see that my parents did and do the best they can. I'm lucky to have my parents around; for Chip, whose mom and stepfather died when he was in his twenties, nothing we do during the holidays is a comforting routine from his past. I'm nearly 35; high time to let go of the blame and anger that erupted out of me when my parents first separated six years ago. And, of course, I've got three good reasons to put on a happy face: my three kids, who love all their grandparents. So I thought that pre-holiday knot in my stomach was mine alone, until Henry asked, "Why do we have to have our Christmas morning the day before Christmas? I'm the only kid in my class who's not having Christmas on Christmas. It's so embarrassing."

"Embarrassing" is his new favorite word, used to describe his emotions about not having a video game system, having his computer privileges taken away for misbehavior, or just being served a dinner he doesn't approve of. So I didn't take him too seriously at first, until he started crying.

I pulled him, long legs, environmentally-insensitive light-up shoes and all, onto my lap and told him again why we have our Christmas morning on December 24th every other year, that since Vincent spends Christmas Day with his mom in the odd years and with us in the even years, rather than go through the motions of a Christmas morning without him, we have our Christmas morning on the 24th if it's an odd year. Then he gets another Christmas morning with his mom on the 25th, we open a few small gifts then as well, and no one feels like they're missing out.

Except, of course, for one thing: in a stepfamily, someone is always missing something. Either we're missing Vincent (and he's missing us), or he's missing his mom and Ziola (and they're missing him). Because Vincent has been going between two houses since he was a toddler, it took us a while to realize that although we've become used to this back-and-forth schedule, he still feels torn much of the time. It took us even longer to realize that the other kids in Vincent's family are also affected by his schedule. Something exciting will happen to Henry while Vincent is at his other house—we'll go to my in-laws and he'll get to play a new video game with his teenage Uncle Ian, or my mom will call and ask if any grandkids want to come and play—and I'll see Henry realize that Vincent isn't going to be with him for this treat. Right now, that saddens him. He's the perfect middle child, the one kid in the family who never wants to be alone. Most days, given the choice of one family member to spend time with, he'd pick Vincent in a second. Out of all of us, he's probably the one most affected when it's one of the three nights of the week Vincent spends at his other house.

Nevertheless, when Henry cried about having to have Christmas early, my first reaction was to dismiss his feelings. If I can't solve the problem, why not try to make believe it doesn't exist? Sure, it didn't work well when I was growing up and still doesn't now, but as an adult, I understand why parents try this strategy; I still hate that I can't protect my kids from every possible hurt, and I find myself pretending that something isn't as painful as they say it is just because I can't face my own lack of omnipotence.

"Think how lucky we are," I tried to convince him. "We get to open presents before anybody else!"

"I don't WANT to open presents before everybody else! I want to open them when normal people do!" he stormed.

Oh. That I understood. "Normal" people and their families were a source of much envy on my part for way too long. There's still a voice in my head that questions whether our family is normal. Sure, I know that normal is an illusion, that perfection is always suspect, but that's hard to remember in my daily life. We all have our reasons for feeling like the other at times; for me, growing up in a large, multiracial family living in an almost all-white suburb meant not being normal. Being the one white sister out of the five daughters in my family meant feeling not normal—and of course, added to that was the sense of guilt I felt for the very real white privilege I saw myself having whenever I saw how differently from me my Korean, Brazilian, and Guatemalan siblings were treated by waitresses, store clerks, and others.

Adults, I found, will say things about race and adoption to the siblings of adopted children that they just wouldn't dream of saying to adoptive parents. The same people who might think it rude to ask lots of nosy questions of my parents thought nothing of asking me whether I really thought of "those kids" as my siblings, or wondered whether they were my foster brothers and sisters, if we were Catholic, or alternatively, Mormon, or if my mom ran a daycare. Any family of twelve gets a lot of attention; add in the fact that seven of my siblings came to our family through international adoption, and you'll start to see how going out to dinner as a family or visiting a park together felt to this shy and self-conscious kid like being on stage all the time.

So when I became a stepmom to a blond, blue-eyed boy who looked, at the time, enough like me to be my biological child, I slipped too easily into wanting to pass as a "normal" family. Since that would have meant denying the existence of Vincent's very real mom, that didn't work out too well, and I came to believe in that hard truth all the cheesy books on stepparenting I frantically read in those early days try to get across: a stepfamily, like an adoptive family, is always, always born out of loss. Denying that just makes life harder for everyone involved.

Henry cried some more when I told him that Vincent had plans to be with his mom's family on Christmas morning. I held myself back from telling him not to cry and pointing out all the fun things we'd be doing that day. I told him I hated not having Vincent all the time but that Vincent has many people who love him, and he wants to spend time with all of them. If he stayed with us on Christmas morning, he'd be missing watching his other sister, Ziola, open presents on her first Christmas as a toddler. We talked about how hard it is for Vincent to always be feeling like he's giving something up by being with one parent or the other.

When Vincent was Henry's age, he came home from first grade one day and asked why he was the only kid in his class who had two houses. Without meaning to, I told Vincent, too cynically, that he wouldn't be the only one for too much longer, given the divorce odds. Turns out I was right; now he's one of several kids in his grade who split their time between houses. What was normal when he was six is less so now that he's ten, and odds are that still more of his friends will join his joint-custody club as he ages. Of course, I didn't know then that I'd be among the members of that club.

When my parents separated, I was nearly thirty, but from my emotional reaction, you would have thought I was two. Maybe this was because my mom did such an amazing job of protecting us from some of the truths about our family; maybe, too, it was because as the oldest child, I was pretty invested in our family myths being true—after all, I was just starting my own family, and having what had seemed like a rock-solid foundation shatter under my feet called into question every truth about marriage and parenting I'd absorbed over the years.

Nothing could have prepared me for the force of that ache I felt of wanting my family to return to the way it had been. When my mom remarried, I felt erased, like one of the shameful mistakes she'd made in her past life in that bad marriage no one else seemed to remember anymore. Her new husband, a kind, patient and incredibly unobtrusive new member of the family, welcomes all of her children and grandchildren into his life. Yet despite how much I like him, I find myself furious with him for not being my dad. It's not fair to this poor man, and I feel it less and less, but I've also decided to cut myself some slack and admit that it might take a little more time for this new family to feel normal. The other one was around for thirty years, and I got used to it. Eventually, I'll get used to this one—and then everything will change again, for one reason or another.

The Christmas I'll celebrate this year with all the fragments of my family is starting to feel like the norm, at least to me. As I write this, Henry is still adamant that he won't do Christmas a day early. "I HATE that idea!" he stormed when I mentioned it again in his presence. I'm counting on the lure of presents and cinnamon rolls to change his mind, but I'm also steeling myself for Henry's holiday tears. Henry will have to find his own way of seeing our family and our traditions. I hope that, unlike me, he doesn't take until he's thirty-five to figure out that no family is normal or perfect, but I figure he's got that option available to him. For now, I get my comfort from these words from Josephine Humphreys' novel Rich in Love:

Our family is not what it was, but we are all gravitating back into family lives of one sort and another; it is a drift that people cannot seem to help, in spite of lessons learned the hard way....I think often of the ancient times, long before Latin, when words were new and had no connotations. Pure words stood for single things: "Family" meant people in a house together. But that was in a language so far back that all its words are gone, a language we can only imagine.

By living our lives in the ways most of us have come to accept as well within the range of normal—leaving marriages which are beyond repair, building families through adoption and remarriage—"family" often means people in different houses, bound together not necessarily by blood but rather by complicated love and memories both joyful and painful. We're creating our language as we speak and live; perhaps by the time Henry grows up, the idea that there is such a thing as a "normal family" will have finally disappeared.