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MY DAUGHTER, GRETCHEN, came home from school one day years ago in crisis. "I have to draw our family tree," she wailed.

It isn't that she has trouble sketching leaves and bark. It's that our family tree has been uprooted and replanted once or twice. OK, four times. And that's just on my side.

I was first married at 18. It lasted eight years and produced two wonderful children. A tree with a straight trunk and two healthy branches.

He remarried, to a woman who had two children of her own. He and she produced a third, which, adding in my two, counts as their fifth. Trunk split by lightning. Add tiny seedling and two grafted twigs.

Then, I married a man who had one daughter from a previous marriage. He and I were together three years and had one son. Patched trunk, new leaves. Third branch on old tree.

When we divorced, he married a divorced woman with three daughters, which gave him two natural children, three stepdaughters, and two ex-stepkids (mine). When they divorced, the ex-stepkid count rose to five. Blossoms nipped in bud.

I married a widower with two children, giving us five little people. Sudden growth spurt. Trunk adds rings.

Well, that didn't work out, so I divorced him and went back to being a mother of three. Heavy pruning.

Finally, the heavens opened up and my current husband fell from the clouds. He claims to have been hanging around town the whole time, just hoping to meet me, but I have my doubts, mostly due to his two ex-wives and three ex-stepchildren.

So what kind of family are we? We can't be drawn as a tree - we look like an orchard that's been under attack by beetles with multisyllabic names and nasty grinding mouth parts.

To some people, I suppose we don't seem like a real family at all. My two oldest children are with me only every other week, and then, only when they're home from college. My youngest is with me only weekdays and spends three weekends a month with his dad. Yes, I am always setting the table for the wrong number of people, and you betcha, I worry that I forgot it was my week as Mom and left someone waiting in vain for a ride home from swimming lessons.

Only two of my children, but three of my first ex-husband's, share my last name. Tying together all of the surnames I could have ever possibly assumed, my handkerchiefs could be embroidered "PJHNALS." If I had just married a vowel or two, I could have been a noun.

I attend school events cautiously, having been introduced by children from both my own personal loins and those of others as "my, you know, other mother," "my dad's wife," "my brother's mother," "my real mom," and "Pam" (the last by my own, actual son). There are never enough seats at school ceremonies for two sets of parents, which overlooks the loving contributions made by long-suffering stepparents everywhere. I don't want to ace my son's stepmom out of a seat at graduation - she struggled to help with that algebra homework of his, too.

No matter how carefully I fill out those little emergency cards, at least once a year some school nurse won't release my own child to me because she thinks I'm no relation. Conferences, en step-masse, confuse even the most attentive teachers. I attended my son's with his stepmother (the dads couldn't make it) and accidentally convinced his teacher that he was being raised by lesbian parents.

My daughter's grade-school class was once charged with drawing and cutting out a paper portrait of each family member, joining them with yarn, and hanging them from the ceiling over their desks. On Open House night, Gretchen's family string was easy to pick out - 13 members long, it spilled over her desk, hit the floor, and continued across the room to the gerbil cage. "It took her longer than anyone else," whispered her teacher. "Some of the other students helped her draw. We had a little assembly line."

Social functions present unique challenges. Like sitting through a dance recital with my husband, my ex-husband, my ex-husband's new wife, my ex-husband's new wife's children, my ex-husband's new children with the new wife, the mother of the new wife who doesn't get this scene at all, and my parents, who are living testimony to the credo that good manners and a bit of grace will see you through anything.

I didn't mean to do this. I spent my formative years, plus a few, in Catholic school, and always thought I'd marry one guy and stay with him forever. Instead of that tidy little life, I got to live the messy, larger one. But it hasn't been a disadvantage, really. I have three remarkable, kind, funny kids, and not an ax murderer among 'em. I gave matrimony a few good, solid tries and finally got it right, teaching all of us that life is unpredictable and that change won't kill you. Those are good things to know, and I'm glad my children learned them.

So to me, family trees seem to be more deciduous than coniferous. If there's an extra twig or a snapped-off limb in a fir or spruce somewhere, it looks more forgiving than on an elm. And somehow, despite falling from a perhaps funky tree, those tough little pine cones seem to know, all by themselves, how to grow straight up. MM

Pamela Hill Nettleton is editor of Minnesota Monthly.