On the wall of the Saunders-Mott family kitchen in Burlington, Vermont, there are seventeen framed photographs. The newest, from June 2025, shows a Christmas dinner with twenty-three people in it. The family has been counting itself, with some difficulty, since 2009.
The marriage at the center of the wall is between Margaret Saunders, sixty-six, and Robert Mott, seventy-one. They married in 2009 after both had been widowed. Between them they had four adult children. Today there are nine grandchildren, two step-grandchildren, and a pending great-grandchild.
The pending great-grandchild, due in August, will be the first to be born into the merged family rather than added to it. The distinction matters more than the family expected it would.
Step-grandparenthood is a relatively understudied area of family sociology. The Center for Family Studies at the University of Minnesota published a paper in early 2025 estimating that 11% of American children have at least one step-grandparent. The figure has been rising slowly since 1990.
What the data does not capture is the variety of arrangements those eleven percent live inside. The step-grandparent who is loved as a grandparent. The step-grandparent who is tolerated. The step-grandparent who is, by mutual unspoken agreement, mostly Mr. Robert at the holidays.
Margaret and Robert have, by their grandchildren's account, mostly landed in the first category. This was not automatic. It took, by Margaret's own accounting in a conversation in May, perhaps six years of patient showing-up.
Robert was a stepfather to Margaret's two adult children when they were already in their thirties. He did not parent them. He did, however, parent the grandchildren in small, accumulating ways. He learned their friend's names. He attended the long, hot middle-school baseball games. He showed up at the high school graduations with the same camera he had used on his own children.
Margaret did the same on the other side. Robert's older daughter, Helen, had two children who were eight and five when Margaret entered the picture. Helen was initially suspicious. She had loved her mother, Robert's first wife, very much, and the speed of the second marriage had startled her.
What changed Helen's mind, by her own account, was a Wednesday in October 2012 when she had a work emergency and Margaret drove forty minutes to pick up the children from after-care. Margaret did not make a thing of it. She made them macaroni and cheese and read them a chapter of a book. Helen came home at nine to find both children asleep on Margaret's lap.
That afternoon did not solve everything. There were still hard birthdays. There were still mentions of the dead grandmother that landed in difficult places. There was a Christmas in 2014 that Helen prefers not to talk about.
But the slow work continued. Margaret was, ten years on, the grandmother who came to the school plays. She was the one the children called when they had a question about a college application. She was, in the operational sense, family.
The challenge for blended families of this configuration is that there is no script. The biological grandparents have, even in our scattered times, a kind of default position. The step-grandparent has to earn one.
Margaret has thought about this a great deal. She did not, when she married Robert, expect to be raising small children again in any sense. She had, she thought, finished that work. She was, she said in May, very glad to have been wrong.
What is harder is the history before her. Helen's children have memories of their other grandmother, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2008. The youngest, Tobin, has only one. He was three when she died. The memory is a smell.
Margaret has, with great care, kept that grandmother alive in the family conversation. There is a photograph of her on a side table in the living room. There is a particular cookie she made that Margaret has learned to make. There is a story Helen tells, on the anniversary, that Margaret listens to as if for the first time.
This is, the family sociologist Joan Bressler at Minnesota would say, the central work of blended families across generations. It is the management of the prior. It is the refusal to ask the children to forget in order to make the new arrangement comfortable.
Robert has had to do similar work in reverse, with Margaret's grandchildren and their late grandfather, who died in 2006. He has a small object of his predecessor's, a fishing lure, on his keychain. He did not have to do this. He chose to.
The wall of seventeen photographs is not, looked at closely, evenly distributed. The years before 2009 have separate pictures from the two halves of the family, taken in different houses. The years after 2009 are mixed. The wall is, in its arrangement, a kind of timeline.
The newest photograph, the June 2025 dinner, has twenty-three people in it. There is one chair empty, by general agreement, for Robert's first wife. The chair is not pointed out. The children, when they are older, will figure it out.
The great-grandchild, due in August, will arrive into a family that has worked, slowly and imperfectly, at making space. She will not know about the hard Christmas in 2014. She will know only that she has, by some accounting, four great-grandparents, and that the Christmas dinner is always at Margaret and Robert's house.
What she will inherit, if the slow work holds, is a family larger than the one she was strictly born into. That is, in the family's quiet view, not the smallest of inheritances. It is what they have been building, with framed photographs and macaroni and cheese and patient showing-up, for seventeen years.
