Can you blend a family? New Orleans can help.

My daughter and I sit on the bench, tied to a crossbar some fifteen feet high, two-foot clearance from the ground. We swing, looking several yards further at the carved out strip of water that connects this series of man-made tributaries and docks to Lake Pontchartrain. We are at a Mexican restaurant, just outside of New Orleans, but outside enough that we have recently returned from a boat trip into the bayou where the tour guide coaxed alligators to the side of the boat to snack on compressed food pellets. The city this is not. There are high water marks on stilt houses along the river where Katrina left her scars, abandoned boats and fishing shanties mix with dense forest and muddy water. The bugs are enormous. This is the bayou, the swamp, and a magical place. So much so that it seems to have captured the imagination of even the most jaded of teenagers, and my daughter is right there with us, wind in her hair as the boat flies down the broader parts of the river before slowly and carefully navigating spring flood plains that would be dry forest come summer. There are owls and raccoons, snakes, rare and magnificent birds, alligators…pig hunting season has just finished and so rightfully the feral hogs are suspicious of boats and nowhere to be seen. Still, this area is wild, and the people who live here are wild too. I admire them. I’d imagine they probably don’t have office hours.

We have arrived here by car, rental, small and efficient, and all we need. My daughter is in the front seat. Ever since my partner Mariana came into our lives a few years ago, she has been focused on not supplanting Emily, not because she wants Emily to like her, but because in her mind it is the right thing to do. Emily has been playing DJ, and as we cruise over a bridge that ascends altogether too high into the sky over the Mississippi and the riverboats and tugs and barges, a local hip-hop group plays loudly over the stereo. We are really here, the South, New Orleans. It hits me as we drive out of the city. There are palm trees lining the roads and further out, dense forest and rusted signs and small towns. It is increasingly rural, but not in the midwestern sense that I am used to. There are no wide open spaces, no farm land. It is rural here only because it is lacking in urban infrastructure.

The restaurant is in a mainly residential area. These water spots and canals have been carved out for private pleasure craft, little fishing boats and speedboats and pontoons that local residents moor outside their stilt-lifted vacation homes. The sun is shining, and across an eight foot wide channel sits an old, marooned boat that is meant to be decorative. We are out back of the restaurant, my daughter, my soon-to-be wife and I. There are picnic tables and sandy beach and bags sets and our swing. We push off with our legs, giggling like when we were both much younger, higher and higher, more vibration in the ropes than feels safe for my kid; she has left me alone to swing and has retreated back to the outdoor table where we await what turned out to be some fairly excellent shrimp tacos.

It's been a win of a day. My daughter, sometimes somewhat cantankerous, is happy. She sits quietly next to my fiancee, and as I glance back over my shoulder, I note that the kid’s phone is not out, and that she is talking to her soon-to-be step-mom. I love the relationship they have. Mariana loves her enough to say and do hard things, and doesn’t particularly care if Emily likes her or not. She will do what she thinks is best for the kid, and she is often on the right track. She’s helped me install healthy boundaries that I’d been unable to install myself when I was in the thick of it, largely a single dad raising a little girl. And Emily above all things respects and trusts Mariana. I think there is a part of her that knows that of all of her parents, Mariana is the most grounded, most adult. I recognize this, and I believe Emily does too.

I head back to the table to eavesdrop, but my arrival changes the drift of things. Whatever they were talking about will stay with them, and that is fine. The tacos are delivered in short order and are delicious. We are all hungry. My daughter has said, out loud, that we should not talk to her until she has eaten because she doesn’t want to be mean, and Mariana and I both see this self-awareness as progress. If I’m being honest, Emily is sometimes…a challenge. A wonderful, glorious, messy, fantastical, hilarious challenge, but a challenge nonetheless. She is like me, and her mother, and her mother’s partner; we are addicts, all in recovery, but addicts nonetheless. And there are endemic personality traits that are familiar territory for people who navigate lives with us. Addicts I mean, not the assembled parentage. We have quirks, idiosyncrasies, features that make us, as a class, difficult. We tend towards selfishness, dishonesty, we don’t like how life feels plain and seek to alter it in a panoply of destructive ways. I am in recovery, and have been for many years, and this means that by and large, a lot of the nastier features of being an addict are controlled or remedied. I pray a lot, I try to be kind, and I tell the truth; this seems to relieve the massive majority of issues. Whatever's left is just me being human I think. But some addicts, even those in recovery, never get to the point where it stops being about the drugs and starts to be about being a better person.

Emily is an addict, and it is still about the drugs. It has been a hard road to trudge with her, as it sometimes feels like she is not actually walking and that we, or I, are carrying her. Sometimes she does want sobriety, and works hard at it. She often falls apart, she cannot be with her own head, it is too loud, too mean, too much like her  mother. And so she runs in the opposite direction. Drugs come naturally to her, like a duck to water. She doesn't like how life feels plain either. I understand her as well as anyone can; I raised her, watched her build the self that she is today from the ground up. She has baggage. We all love her, we all pull for her, we all do what we can. But ultimately, she will have to figure it out for herself, and she is not doing that on this New Orleans trip. 

But, she is being pleasant enough, taking little rips of her weed pen, and thinking about having a drink (that we sanctioned for this trip to keep the peace, and because it is New Orleans for god’s sake) when we get back to the room. And then we will walk Bourbon Street as a family, Emily leading the way, quickly, and Mariana straddling the middle. I lag behind, partially because I walk slowly, partially because I like watching the two people that I love most in the world walk togetherish in front of me through the magical festival that is drunk tourists and French and Black culture and live music, t-shirt shops, voodoo, vice. I love them both infinitely, I love being with them here. I love the dinner we have, crab cakes, gumbo, jambalaya, mozzarella and pesto and balsamic; delicious food that this beautiful city is known for. I love walking a little further up the road to get beignets, and I love being together, bathing in the history of this place. Voodoo spirits pull us in all directions, the ghosts of Old Orleans meet us on every corner, sometimes living people, sometimes ethereal spectres that one must feel rather than see. But we all feel them, I know, because we are, all three of us, under the same spell. 

For a moment, Emily is not an addict with the struggles that come with active use, I am no longer the father of a young lady who is a step away from either crisis or finding herself, and Mariana is no longer a woman who is trying her best to figure out how to help us both. We are together, three travelers, both physically and spiritually, and we are so drenched in the spirit of this place that worldly concerns seem to drift away on the backs of the notes of the vibrant music coming from every jazz club, honky-tonk and zydeco bar that fill this place with its quintessential ether. There is nothing here but endless history and the present moment, tonight but never tomorrow, and with all of it and none of it, we are for better or worse, three people who love each other, a family amidst the ghosts.