Sun and Storms: Chronicles of a Stepfamily is a book about my family's odyssey in grieving loss, celebrating love, uniting families, and creating a satisfying stepfamily life.

Odyssey is an appropriate word for my family's journey. It's what this book is all about. The love Jack and I have for each other is deep and real, but that doesn't mean our family life begins that way. When you read our story, you will see that it's as if my family, like Odysseus, casts about on the high seas, trying to get home, hoping that a place called home exists, a place where a family can put down roots.

This book began as a private journal. During the most stressful times in my life, I have turned to journal writing. When I was a student teacher, I kept a journal. When I found myself on the picket line as a teacher, I kept a journal. When I got divorced and then remarried, I began journaling again. It was my way of coping as my world burned to the ground only to rise again in the form of a stepfamily. And as this new family came into being, born out of the ashes of divorce, my family members and I entered a world where birth and death cohabitated. As Picasso said, "The first act of creation is an act of destruction."

Putting pen to paper gave voice to the myriad emotions I experienced during these tumultuous times-sadness, confusion, anger, guilt, euphoria, fear, and happiness. When I decided to make my private words public, I found that the rawness of living this life has kept me away from the keyboard at times and eventually drawn me to it. It is not easy to write about the most intimate details of your life without choking on them every now and then. And reliving some of the early days by writing about them has tugged at my heart even when I thought I had cried all the tears possible.

The stories in this book are a record of my family's moments. The poet, T. S. Elliot, said that our lives are measured out in coffee spoons. His is an apt description of how my family has experienced creating our life together in carefully and carelessly measured little moments. In mundane and mysterious ways, we have forged a family. In the end, you will find that this book is about the most basic of human needs-the deep desire to belong. If life is, at its essence, about relationships (the ones you've had, the ones you have, and the ones yet to come) then this book is about how a few strangers came together, seeking a way to connect in order to feel valued and important in the confusing world of stepfamilies, a world where the old family definitions and rules don't apply.

The stories are grouped into three collections. Each collection begins with a few introductory remarks and concludes with a summary of the lessons learned. The first collection, First Say Good-bye, captures the process of letting go that must happen in order for a healthy stepfamily to be born. Brian, my son, and I have a difficult time saying good-bye to our "first family." There is less than one year between the loss of our nuclear family and the beginning of our stepfamily, so we both had to shed the memory of family life, as we had known it, while embracing a new family form. Jack, Michael and Jennifer had to grieve, too. They lost their cozy threesome and less structured family life. Michael told his dad after two months of stepfamilyhood, "Dad, I just got used to the three of us being a family, and now it's changing again."

And that hardly denotes the many losses we all experience. All of us clumsily grapple with the hard fact that creating a stepfamily is not like creating a nuclear family. Pregnancy and birth do not precede it. Loss does. In our case, all of us had lost something we thought we would always have, our intact families and innocence about family life.

No Man's Land, the second collection, illustrates the in-between state where we lived for a very long time. Chaos reigns. There is more confusion than order. This phase of my family's life reminds me of the puzzles that my son was so fond of when he was three years old. He thrilled to discover the hidden objects in those picture puzzles: a peacock sitting at a table, an upside down spoon hanging in a tree, or a smiling moose hiding in a closet. In No Man's Land, the five of us are all trying to discover the order and truth hidden in the confusion and chaos. "Beware of..." signs are plastered to a bedroom door, warning of war, and oatmeal cookies in the cookie jar point to a traitor in our midst.

The third collection, Time and Truth, is about putting down roots in new soil. These stories capture a family that is beginning to like itself. There are toasts to a new family room and tales shared between family members. Family life begins to settle down, and real relationships now exist. Our family feels solid most days, norms are evident, and history has been built, something I have discovered is very significant for a family. Our individual roles-stepparent, stepchild-are pretty satisfying. It's probably as good as it gets. Having always strived for perfection, I now know that good can be pretty great. Courting perfection can lead to insanity.

As a final note, I hope that you will find some inspiration within these pages. I present this book as a humble offering to all the stepfamilies that may read it. Perhaps you will find a morsel of sustenance here and there. My wish for every stepfamily is this: May the journey be rich and rewarding. Here's to stepfamilies!