Split Decision : For Millions of Step Families, the Holidays Mean Driving Marathons, Double Meals and, Often, Feelings of Guilt

It’s Thanksgiving Day and 12-year-old Jason Pierce is sitting on the living room couch in his family’s comfortable Cerritos tract home. In the kitchen, his stepmother, Irene, is surrounded by family members as she and her mother lift a steaming, 20-pound turkey out of its pan.

Jason’s father, Jim, straddles the open patio door as he puffs on a cigarette, trying to blow the smoke away from his guests. Jason’s 15-year-old stepbrother, John-Michael Montes, is counting the fish he keeps in an aquarium by the kitchen; several little cousins play nearby.

It’s a lovely, thoroughly conventional Thanksgiving scene.

But in the living room, Jason is neither counting his blessings nor anticipating pumpkin pie. He is telling a stranger about the lawyer he hopes will represent him in a custody fight.

Jason wants to live with his mother in Tennessee. Jim Pierce, who has custody of his son, wants him to stay put.

“I’m old enough to pick,” says Jason. “I’m calling my lawyer tomorrow to see when I can get a court date. I’ll tell the judge I want to live with my mom.”

Jason, whose parents divorced when he was a toddler, always feels his loyalties are divided. But around the holidays, he says, his ambivalence intensifies. “It’s hard,” he says, “because if I’m with my mom, I want to be with my dad, but I’m glad I’m with my mom. But if I’m with my dad, I want to be with my mom, but I’m glad I’m with my dad.

“Both your parents want you. Then if you go to one, the other one feels bad; then if you move to the other, the other one feels bad.”

Sometimes, when the bad feelings start to overwhelm him, Jason does the only constructive thing he can think of: He goes to the park and runs.

With Thanksgiving a memory and Christmas closing in, plenty of children are feeling like Jason. Between 15 and 16 million of the country’s 63.6 million children live with a single divorced parent or in a step family, according to statistics kept by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Stepfamily Foundation.

Children aren’t the only ones who will experience the pangs of dividing their time and their hearts during the holidays. Moms will be fending off the heaviness that descends when their children leave to spend Christmas Eve at Daddy’s house. Dads will spend lots of time behind the wheel, carting children from home to Mom’s to Grandma’s.

And so, step families celebrating their first holidays together try to figure out how to combine their cultures and traditions. And almost everyone will be feeling a little blue because they can’t be.

These emotions and efforts testify to the magnetic strength of the family. Divorce or death may pull this most primal social unit apart, but nothing can prevent it from re-creating itself.

The holidays can be a minefield of emotions and logistics for just about everyone, but they are even more treacherous for split families, which must navigate--with precision, maturity and humor--the stormy passage that links November to January.

Just as the Pierces are settling down to their feast in Cerritos, the Robertson clan in Culver City is finishing up the dishes from its holiday repast. This is the second shared Thanksgiving for Tim Robertson, who has custody of daughters Brianna, 11, and McKenna, 5, and his girlfriend, Joni Pierson, who lives with Kim, 10, and Stephanie, 6.

Robertson, 41, an architect, and Pierson, 34, a day-care center operator, are sitting in his parents’ back yard with their kids, while Robertson’s mother, sisters and nieces get dessert ready.

Pierson says her holidays sometimes feel like driving marathons.

“I want (my daughters) to have time with both parents, and I’m responsible for them being seen by their grandparents on both sides,” she says. “It is a lot of driving around.”

Stephanie, Pierson’s younger child, nods in agreement. “It’s kinda weird to be back and forth from my mom’s house to my dad’s house. It just feels weird, going to different places all the time. Sometimes, it makes me feel sad.”

On this day, the Pierson girls woke up at their mother’s house and were driven by Pierson to Pasadena to visit their father’s parents. Just as Pierson returned from dropping the girls off in Pasadena, her ex-husband called unexpectedly to say he wanted to visit with the girls and would bring them home.

“He didn’t tell us he was going to be there,” says Kim. “Sometimes I feel sad, but I don’t know. Today it felt sort of happy.”

Christmas promises to be just as mobile for both families.

Robertson’s daughter, Brianna, explains: “We spend the night with my dad, we get up and open our presents, then we get dressed and we come over here (to Robertson’s parents’ house). Then my mom picks us up here and takes us to her house so we can get presents. Then she takes us to our other grandma’s so we can celebrate with them in Granada Hills.”

Pierson’s eldest, Kim, chimes in: “For us, it’s pretty much we spend the night at our mom’s house (in West Los Angeles), then we open our presents, then our dad comes by and picks us up to take us to his house (in Canoga Park), then he takes us to our grandma’s house (in South Pasadena), then we come back to my house or we go to my aunt’s house to celebrate Christmas with the rest of the family.”

The hardest part of splitting holidays, says Robertson, is that his daughters often don’t want to leave their cousins when it comes time to be picked up by their mom.

“They say, ‘We wanna stay,’ but I tell them that this is their time to be with their mother.”

That is precisely the way to handle such a conflict, says Neil Kalter, a therapist and director of the Center for the Child and the Family at the University of Michigan.

“It is always a good idea, if possible, for adults to act like adults,” Kalter says. “If you’re a single parent, your (children) may be reluctant to leave because they may be concerned about how you will do alone. Parents should sit down and say, ‘Hey, this is the arrangement. You will be with me, then you’ll go to Dad’s.’

He suggests using the third person to reassure your children. Instead of saying, “Don’t worry about leaving me alone,” say “A lot of kids think their moms might be lonely when they go see their dads, but even if the moms haven’t married again, they enjoy having time to themselves.”

Three days before Thanksgiving, Lisa Hinte is sitting in the living room of her step-grandparents’ home near Carthay Circle in West Los Angeles. A study in hip with her ruby lips, slicked-back hair and black leggings, Lisa, 21, reflects on what the holidays have come to mean for her, the grown child of divorced parents.

“I guess I kinda go numb around the holidays,” she says. “I kinda shut off.”

“My fantasy about the holiday is having my own family, having a big family. I really long for a loving, warm family . . . to go to a big house and have, you know, the fireplace and everybody being warm together and nice together. . . . I know that I’ll never have that.”

Her parents, Gary and Diane Hinte, divorced when she was 5; they believe they have maintained a cooperative relationship over the years. Lisa lived with her mother until she was 13. Then she moved in with her father, who owns an art printing business, and his wife, Carol Samuels, a therapist who heads a local chapter of the Stepfamily Assn. of America.

There have been times when Gary, 57, and Carol, 52, have tried to re-create the holiday family dinner for Lisa and her older brother, Jeff, a graduate student at the University of Michigan. Last Christmas, they invited Diane to join them.

“It was nice, but it was a little uncomfortable,” says Diane, 49, a sales manager for a fiber optics company. “It’s not something I would want to do all the time.”

“She left right after dinner,” says Carol. “That good feeling only goes a certain way. There are these little emotional ripples. You know (how) when you watch the ocean and a wind goes across the surface? It’s like that.”

Gary, though, says he didn’t notice any discomfort. “I enjoy so much having everybody together that I kind of shine on the differences,” he says.

“The holidays, from Thanksgiving on, are all family-centered and family-focused,” says Tom Seibt, a therapist and step-family specialist who teaches at the California Family Study Center in North Hollywood. That’s why a lot of children of divorced parents get the “what’s-wrong-with-us?” blues or indulge in fantasies like Lisa’s.

“For the kids, the feeling of family comes from their sense of who the members of the family are,” says Seibt. “I’m sure you’ve heard the statement that ‘divorce doesn’t end the family, it only restructures it.’ And that’s important because kids have their own internal picture of who is in and who is not in the family, and they are very protective of that image or fantasy.”

The happy family fantasy dished up by the media is tremendously disheartening to the millions of families that cannot hope to attain it. What they need to remember, says Constance Ahrons, a USC professor and co-author of “Living with Divorce,” is that intact families aren’t exactly perfect units either.

“Divorced and remarried families are the predominant trend, and we treat them as though they’re unusual or deviant,” she says.

“We have nostalgia for a family of the past, and we forget that that family was not always that happy. What about alcoholism? Incest?”

A common refrain among divorced parents is that a holiday without children doesn’t really feel like a holiday.

“The tradition of being together was shattered,” Gary Hinte says, “so trying to make holidays on our own was kind of an empty task.”

Joni Pierson was miserable two years ago when her girls spent Christmas Eve with their father.

“It’s important to me that they wake up with me on Christmas morning,” she says. “The year before last, they woke up at his house on Christmas Day. It was difficult for me.”

Jim and Irene Pierce, both 44, say that when Jason is with his mother and John-Michael is at his father’s on Christmas Day, their house feels painfully empty. “You look around and go, ‘Today’s Christmas? Uh-uh. Where are the kids? Where is the family?’ ”

Self-pity is an easy trap for a lonely parent, says Seibt. It is especially damaging when the children are made to feel guilty.

“A lot of times, unconsciously, they say things that make the kid feel guilty: ‘I want you to have fun with your dad and I’m going to be all alone,’ ” he says.

Instead, he says, parents should make plans for themselves, then reassure their children that, ‘I love you and I am taking care of myself, and this is Dad’s Christmas with you and next year you will spend Christmas with me.’ ”

If parents don’t want children to leave, he says, they are “just gonna have to learn to deal with it.”

The way ex-spouses treat each other always affects how children handle a divorce, but during the holidays children are especially sensitive to hostility, which can reverberate like sonic booms.

Seibt says that around the holidays he sees things “going kind of crazy” with the step families he counsels, “because if you’ve got a situation where the parents can’t work out the issues, or the parents still continue to be in conflict and fighting, the kid will be caught in the middle and will feel that he has to please one or the other parent and will feel guilty if he chooses to see one or the other of them.”

Moreover, the couples who fight the hardest after divorce are still profoundly bonded, he says.

In “Divorced Families,” Ahrons categorizes the types of post-divorce parenting relationships. They range from “perfect pals” to “fiery foes.”

“The major finding of my study is that we have a stereotype of what ex-spouses look like in their relationships: angry people who can’t talk to each other,” says Ahrons. “Yet, we find a good percentage of people who are quite cooperative after divorce . . . because of the children.”

The Pierces, active in their local Stepfamily Assn., experience both extremes. Jim’s relationship with his ex-wife, Peggy Larson, is tense and angry, while Irene’s relationship with her ex-husband, Juan Montes, and his wife, Shirley, is cordial.

As it happens, the lawyer Jason Pierce planned to contact was on vacation the day after Thanksgiving. But Jason is confident a judge will rule in his favor because he plans to accuse his father of lying during a previous custody hearing.

“I feel that my dad lied about me in court to get custody,” says Jason. He adds that he loves both his parents but prefers the friendlier, rural atmosphere of Tennessee. And he fears that his mother, who recently divorced again, is lonely.

Jason’s father says he is “one, hurt; two, angry, and three, frustrated” by the situation, although he says he is not angry at his son. He believes Jason misunderstood the custody proceeding because he was not in the courtroom. And he says he doubts that Jason fully understands the legal process involved.

“He’s caught in loyalty conflicts,” says Pierce.

In the meantime, Jason will be spending Christmas in California this year because he is optimistic that next year he will be living with his mother, who is encouraging his legal fight.

Unlike a lot of children of divorced parents, Jason doesn’t yearn for his parents to be together for the holidays. For one thing, he was so young when they split up that he doesn’t remember them ever spending the holidays together. For another, he knows they can’t be in the same room.

“They’d end up killing each other,” he says. “Someone would start carving the turkey, and they’d end up carving the other person.”

He shakes his head and smiles a little at what he’s just said, the way you might just before you cry.