Introduction

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by other people’s families. My own family was fragmented and haunted by unfulfilled longings. My parents came from different races. They divorced. They began relationships with others. They had children with others. They lived three thousand miles apart. They had wildly divergent worldviews. They did not communicate often or, from my perspective, well. As I shuttled back and forth across the country to spend time with each parent, navigated the murky waters of a multiracial identity, and struggled to negotiate tricky relationships with my stepmother and half-siblings, I didn’t feel my parents were fully aware of the implications of their decisions. Though they may have tried, they weren’t able to ensure my emotional wellbeing in the midst of their vicissitudes. My parents loved each other deeply, but they never figured out how to actually be a family.

I can’t say for sure why this was so. My parents both came from less than idyllic families, which may have had something to do with their difficulty charting a steadier course for ours. But my parents were also part of a larger generational movement that rebelled against the traditional nuclear family. When they met in the early 1960s, divorce was stigmatized and not easy to obtain. Interracial marriage was illegal in most states, birth control just barely available, and abortion hidden away in back alleys. Women were just beginning to enter the workforce in large numbers. Homosexuality was classified as deviant, a psychiatric disorder. A family was expected to live in one community, in one house, for decades. Their children attended the local public or parochial school. Emotional subtleties were regarded with suspicion, and circumscribed “family values” went, for the most part, unquestioned.

Though you’d have to ask them for particulars, I think it’s safe to say that my parents identified this paradigm as part of a larger system responsible for the oppression of women and people of color, and the repression of human sexuality and potential overall. Thus armed, they gave themselves permission to smash the paradigm to bits by doing the exact opposite of what was expected, which translated loosely into doing whatever they wanted or, perhaps more accurately, whatever they could piece together. This meant marrying when it was illegal to do so, cultivating both of their careers, and moving from one city to another as opportunities arose. It also meant divorcing without lawyers or acrimony, devising a custody plan that moved me between their houses, three thousand miles and many worlds apart, every two years. It meant not talking to each other for more than ten minutes, up until the day I graduated from high school.

Whether this chain of events transpired by happenstance or design, the result was the same. Plans were made, and then abandoned. Subsequent complications were left largely unresolved. I floundered in the midst of a series of upheavals, watched a popular television show about a white, “blended” family called the Brady Bunch with longing, and was certain that everyone else’s family was more coherent and stable, more “family-like,” than my own. I tested my hypothesis by spending an inordinate amount of time at the homes of my friends, convinced I could find the missing ingredient, the rarefied glue that coalesced seemingly random individuals into indivisible clans.

When I was ten, I stayed nights in a tiny apartment with a friend whose mother slept the entire time I visited—the only hours she didn’t have to work. In seventh grade, I spent weekends with my best friend amidst shaky, broken-down stairs, entire walls of peeling paint, and an angry father who punished his children for the tiniest indiscretion. At thirteen, I was a regular fixture at the house of a friend whose dad smoked what was known in the neighborhood as “the best fucking pot in the state.” We chanted along to “We don’t need no education” in his cave-like study, oblivious to the irony that he was a teacher at the high school his daughter and I would eventually attend.

I also visited families that didn’t skirt the edge of acceptable middle class–dom. I met, for instance, a lovely family on a bus tour of Ireland. Everyone in the family had names starting with the letter S, and they invited me to stay at their midcentury modern house in upstate New York. I found it a little dull, but charming nonetheless. I felt the same way about a nice, middle-class family—the father was a doctor, the mother a schoolteacher—living next door. Their young daughter and I shoveled spoonfuls of coveted (but verboten at my house) Marshmallow Fluff into our mouths, and romped through each floor of her Marimekko’d house with abandon.

By the time I graduated from high school, I had concluded that some families were like mine—they broke the rules and made up new ones as they went along, with hit-or-miss results. And some families were not like mine—they hewed to a more traditional path that appeared more stable, but lacked the frisson of experimentation. The first group explored new territory, but couldn’t determine a workable cartography for the future. The latter followed a decades-old map, dangerously oblivious to tectonic shifts occurring beneath the surface.

By the time I had my son fifteen years later, I had made several attempts to create a family of my own. I winged it, searching for stability but stumbling over patterns of intimacy that seemed built into my DNA. There was a relationship with a sexy musician who may or may not have been on drugs. There was a guy who lived six thousand miles and twenty cultural galaxies away. My high school sweetheart followed me across the country for my first two years of college, but my working night and day on a documentary one hot summer in a borrowed condo on the Upper East Side of Manhattan ripped our relationship to shreds. Then I fell for a guy who was kind of right for me. But he came from an intact family and his parents had pictures of him and his sisters all over the walls of the house they’d lived in for twenty-five years, and every time I slept over (in a separate bedroom, of course), I felt like an insecure freak from a broken home. Which eventually made him crazy and swear, to my face, that he would never again go out with anyone whose parents were divorced.

It was a lot of fun.

So when my son was born and I saw him lying strapped to a board under an oxygen tent, unable to breathe on his own because he’d had a difficult birth with all sorts of complications, I realized I had to get my proverbial stuff together. Decisions had to be made. Promises had to be kept. I couldn’t just shake my head and say I tried my best if he told me one day I had been an awful mother and he wanted—no, needed—to live in the desert in a tent with his pet iguana. I listened to his raspy breathing and let the reality of responsibility wash over me. It was now or never, I thought to myself. Romantic love doth not a family make. Bogus, manufactured ideas of following your bliss can lead you over a cliff without a parachute. Make some sane, considered decisions and live with them for a while. If they don’t work, reevaluate and change the plan. Make sure the boy doesn’t suffer unnecessarily in the process. Take responsibility. Grow up.

Which was also a lot of fun, and, given my track record, as likely as gathering odds and ends from my kitchen, building a rocket ship, and flying to the moon. To my credit, though, by the time I went into labor, I had learned a few things. I knew I wasn’t willing to follow any doctrine, including “attachment parenting,” blindly. I was certain I didn’t want to “just do what felt right in the moment” again, either. I knew I had to create a hybrid modality, a stable but adaptive platform for family life. Like the operating system on my computer, it had to be sophisticated enough to handle several programs at once without crashing, or worse, blowing the motherboard.

I decided to put the family-watching skills I developed as a child to use by editing a collection of essays about contemporary families that balance the traditional and the countercultural, the cliché and the experimental. I jumped into the project because I wasn’t alone in my search to be both authentic and sane. My friends and colleagues had also recovered from childhoods full of too much or too little, and were looking to fashion an adulthood out of wisdom gained. Hours and hours of their lives were devoted to researching and integrating elements that could make their crazy, complex twenty-first- century families work. My book would be the ultimate reference book for all of us, I thought, a modern anthology version of Dr. Spock.

When I started to talk about the project with friends, I was taken aback by the stories that poured in. A man had stopped working and embraced poverty to be at home with his kids and thought all men should do the same. A couple lived in a cohousing community—part commune and part superluxe modern prefab. Another woman had married her dog, and found the relationship infinitely more satisfying than the one she had with her ex-husband. A bisexual couple spent half the year with each other, and the other six months with their other, opposite-gendered lovers. An activist from Boston organized on behalf of the legal recognition of friendships.

I was shocked by how many people were searching for authenticity through experimentation. The configurations seemed endless, but to me, the child of one such earlier experiment, the challenges did too. Before long I was back in junior high, peering into my friends’ living rooms and looking for answers. Only this time, I was looking for stability, complexity, longevity, and overall satisfaction. When I saw those four elements in a family, no matter what it looked like, I paid closer attention. I wanted to know more. I commissioned an essay.

Two years later, I am happy to report that I have learned something about how to be a family from each and every writer in this book, and collectively their insights comprise the best list of guidelines for the twenty-first-century family a person could ever want. Talking about her open marriage, Jenny Block says we have to make every decision that affects our families with extreme care, putting the needs of everyone in the family at the forefront. In her essay about becoming a single mother, asha bandele says hopes and dreams can only go so far—emotional needs must be met in order for a family to thrive. On marrying her gay best friend to keep him in the country, Liza Monroy says that even the law cannot obstruct actions we sometimes must take on behalf of the ones we love.

On the surface, Sasha Hom’s modern nomadic family seems almost too fluid, but dig a little deeper and it’s clear the Hom family makes decisions with staggering commitment and the intention to persevere—two components I now deem necessary for family life. Neal Pollack and husband-and-wife team Marc and Amy Vachon solve the problem of part-time househusbandry in very different ways, but the core family principle couldn’t be any clearer: split the workload. Suzanne Kamata and Susan McKinney de Ortega, who live in Japan and Mexico, respectively, with their husbands, say that intercultural families can work beautifully, but agree that differences cannot be glossed over, and surrendering at least some of your expectations is essential.

Min Jin Lee and ZZ Packer say it’s rarely bad to challenge assumptions about race, class, and social circumstance, but suggest we do it responsibly—without disrupting the applecart so much that we injure ourselves, or our kids. Paula Penn-Nabrit and Dawn Friedman say that whether exhausting, or heartbreaking, the decisions we make should benefit our families not just today or tomorrow, but two, three, or even six decades from now. Amy Anderson says a family can never be too big, too small, or too blended. Judith Levine says money can’t buy love, but it does play an important role in every relationship and should be examined accordingly.

One of the most affirming aspects of working on this book has been learning of the extraordinary decisions writers have made on behalf of their families. Dan Savage adopts a son, keeps the door open for his son’s drug-addicted mom, and lets his ordinary defenses give way to something larger than fear and judgment. Antonio Caya gives his DNA to a woman who longs for a child, and follows something infinitely more intelligent than his intellect. Meredith Maran implores a friend to reconsider filing for divorce, revisits the trauma of her own divorce, and summons compassion not just for her friend, but for herself.

In the final essay of the book, Rebecca Barry buys a ramshackle fantasy house, puts her foot through the floor, and ends up in couples therapy with her sister.

All in the name of making one big happy family.

There is so much to be learned here, but I welcome you to this book with the big idea that a great family, like a great piece of art, is made one decision at a time. Each essay proves we create our families with the choices we make every day. No family is a cakewalk, but if we abandon dogma and arrogance, tradition and happenstance, we are left with information and faith. Our only option is to think deeply about every step, move forward with discipline and an eye toward longevity and the greater good, and have faith we have done the right thing. If ten years pass and our family is thriving, we know we’ve made good decisions. If ten years pass and it’s falling apart, well, we can credit our decisions for that too.

My son is almost four years old. Our house has good days and bad days, but overall, life is sane, stable, and happy. I am no longer winging it. I don’t look to other families for the answer. Some decisions are more difficult to make than others, but my partner and I, sometimes kicking and screaming, try to make the best ones possible.

So far, it’s made all the difference.

1. And Then We Were Poly Jenny Block
2. Woman Up asha bandele
3. The Enemy Within Dan Savage
4. Foreign Relations Suzanne Kamata
5. Counting on Cousins Amy Anderson
6. The Look ZZ Packer
7. Like Family Min Jin Lee
8. Daddy Donoring Antonio Caya
9. Two Red Lines Susan McKinney de Ortega
10. My First Husband Liza Monroy
11. Home Alone Together Neal Pollack
12. Love, Money, and the Unmarried Couple Judith Levine
13. Unassisted Sasha Hom
14. Sharing Madison Dawn Friedman
15. Half the Work, All the Fun Marc and Amy Vachon
16. How Homeschooling Made Our Family More of What We Wanted It to Be Paula Penn-Nabrit
17. Till Life Do Us Part Meredith Maran
18. This Old House Rebecca Barry

Acknowledgments
Credits
About the Contributors
A moving, wildly diverse collection showing how radically different familial configurations can work.

Prompted by her experiences growing up in a family "fragmented and haunted by unfulfilled longings," Walker (Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence, 2007, etc.) looks beyond her well-publicized estrangement from her mother, novelist Alice Walker, to the lives of other writers "searching for authenticity through experimentation" in their domestic situations. The essays she assembles smash class, race and gender stereotypes to collectively demonstrate the fluidity of the contemporary family unit. Resisting the traditional boundaries of coupledom, Jenny Block, on the one hand, celebrates the openness of what she calls a "polyamorous marriage" with her husband and her girlfriend. On the other hand, Judith Levine and her boyfriend, together for 17 years, never married for a number of practical and philosophic reasons. Writes Levine: "A marriage may or may not be a union of love. It is always a union of property...I'd like the state to get out of the sexual-licensing business altogether, actually, for couples gay, straight, bi, or none of the above." Essays by Dan Savage and Dawn Friedman lay bare the highs and lows of open adoption. Savage details the difficulty he and his partner have in deciding what to say to their adoptive son when his homeless, substance- abusing biological mother drops out of touch for more than a year: "Which two- by-four to hit him with? That his mother was in all likelihood dead? Or that she was out there somewhere but didn't care enough to come by or call?" Friedman, while admitting to occasional twinges of jealousy and guilt evoked by having her daughter's birth mother integrated into their lives, trumpets openness for her daughter's sake: "She will never have to wonder why her first mother chose adoption; she can ask her." Rebecca Barry closes the anthology with a frank, humorous exploration of how she and her sister ended up in couples therapy.

Eye-opening and sometimes shocking, as it brilliantly explodes traditional notions about the nuclear family.
— Kirkus Reviews (starred)

1. What inspired you to put together a book about the contemporary American family? What does your fascination with the modern family stem from?

I edited this collection when I gave birth to my son and found myself in a nontraditional family. My partner was a man fifteen years older than me with a daughter two years younger; I had a thirteen year-old non-biological child from an eight-year relationship with a woman. And that was just the beginning of the complexity! Our family seemed odd and hard and fun and new, and I wanted to read a book that reflected some of the struggles and victories of families like mine: twenty-first-century families.

I also wanted to peer into the lives of other new-tradition families to see how they were making out. I wanted to evaluate their strategies and states of mind, to compare notes. I wanted to give legitimacy to all of the decisions being made today, to say yes, you can take a risk and make a happy family, too. Different does not have to mean tragic; it can simply mean real, authentic and sui generis.

2. The family you grew up in was the product of an interracial marriage at a time when this was illegal in most states, and both your parents worked and cultivated their careers in an age when stay-at-home mothers were the norm. How has your experience growing up in such a nontraditional arrangement shaped your understanding of what it means to be a family?

I never learned how to just “be” in a family. Everything was always changing—there was always a role to play, a performance to give. I’m now learning what it means to relax into family life. The other day I was laughing with my partner—I said, I get it! Family means everyone knows you’re neurotic and it drives them nuts, but they put up with it anyway because they love you!

Obviously, that’s a simplification of a complex matrix, but I grew up with the idea that being in a family meant that if you weren’t happy and fulfilled all of the time, and if you weren’t, well, that’s what divorce was for. There wasn’t really a sense of we made this decision, and the power of our union is in staying together come what may. Growing up the way I did made me understand the importance of commitment to one’s family no matter what. It’s also made me crave stability. And it’s put me on a mission to achieve both for my son.

My parents were pioneers, and I am inspired by their determination to love when it was, to quote my mother, “unfashionable.” But ultimately, as asha bandale writes in her lovely piece in the book, ideological progressivism and political views don’t make a family. You can believe that love conquers all, but often, it just doesn’t. Unless you have intimacy skills and a commitment that transcends politics, your family will flounder.

3. You describe your early failed attempts to create a family of your own—with a female musician with a possible drug habit, with a man who lived six thousand miles away, with a man from such a seemingly healthy, traditional family that it made you feel in contrast “like an insecure freak from a broken home.” Were these early attempts at building a family informed or determined by your family life growing up? How did you work to overcome these failed attempts?

I would say yes to question number one, and therapy, Buddhism, and separating myself from people who don’t have my best interests and happiness on their agenda to question number two. Also making tough decisions about what’s more important to me: winning prizes and making money or keeping my family together. That is, committing at a profound level. Obviously divorce is out there, but I don’t live every day thinking of it as a real option. I do the opposite. And it really helps. When you’re not always thinking about leaving, or the ability to leave, you start problem-solving.

Also realizing I can be a total pain in the ass as a partner, and a sometimes inconsistent and distracted mom really helps. I hope that being honest with myself about my many shortcomings will make it easier for all involved. Fingers crossed! Accepting that I can’t be the perfect anything: daughter, spouse, mother, stepmother, etc. has made a big difference.

4. The book is in a way a celebration of the family in its myriad, often untraditional forms. Yet you describe the highly untraditional family you grew up in as ultimately dysfunctional. What have the nontraditional families in this book mastered that your family growing up never did? What is the essential difference between those families and the family your parents created?

There is a lot more support for these families than my parents had. The decisions they make are, I think, more conscious, considered, and cautious. They have the benefit of the failures of the previous generation.

I do think that, unlike mine, these families are determined to make it, no matter what. I love Meredith Maran’s piece for that reason—it’s a meditation on how not to get divorced. For most of these families, divorce is not on the table. Period. This is a huge difference from my parents’ generation, when divorce was a symbol of empowerment, revolution, and freedom from the patriarchal state.

On the other hand, who knows? We won’t know if these families will fare any better than mine for another ten or twenty years. Again, fingers crossed that everyone makes it out alive and reasonably unscathed. I chose these writers because they seem happy. Even with all the struggle and challenges, they are making, as asha bandele writes, “something like beautiful” out of their lives.

5. In seeking out writers for this collection, what was it about a particular writers’ family life that interested you and compelled you to commission an essay? What do all of the families discussed in this book have in common, if anything?

They are all making choices more common than the mainstream culture admits. There are certainly more families that practice responsible non-monogamy, families negotiating one or more members in prison, families determined not to divorce, families trying to build artist communities for their kids to grow up in, men donating their sperm to their friends, etc. than gets talked about on CNN.

Also, each of these families, like Paula Penn-Nabrit, has decided to create a new modality rather than conform or adapt to one that already exists. I like the idea of people trusting they can make their own model that isn’t reactive—and that’s as good as if not better than what came before. The writers in this book are emotional artists, familial architects, psychoemotional engineers.

We need people to show us how to rewire our inner circuitry, to let go of old patters and take responsibility for birthing new possibilities.

6. What are the qualities that make a family work? How can a family cultivate these qualities? Conversely, which qualities indicate that a family is not working, and how can these be avoided?

Honesty. Flexibility. Openness. Empathy. Responsibility. Commitment. Knowing that everyone in the family might not always get what they want, but believing everyone should get what they need.

It’s crucial that everyone in the family take responsibility for their own personal dissatisfaction rather than projecting it on to others. I could go on and on.

Signs things are not working? Unhappy people. A lot of free-floating jealousy, anxiety, animosity, and competitiveness. Stagnation. Unresolved issues that bubble up when people are in the same room together for longer than fifteen minutes. Lack of joie de vivre! Bad sex.

How to avoid? Read the book and emulate the writers!

It’s a cliché, but working on yourself is really the best way—I work on patience, acceptance, paying attention to what other people feel (I have recently been told I need to work on my “outsight”; I’ve got insight down), eradicating selfishness, protecting the sovereignty and sanctity of your family with intention. Trying to own your own shortcomings rather than visit them on your offspring. Basically, if we prioritize the inner workings of our families as much as we prioritize the nuances of our careers, we’d be in good shape.

7. What would you say to social conservatives who lament the decay of the nuclear family and credit it as the source of a variety of social ills? Do you believe there was ever a “golden era” for the family, in which families were more stable and happier than they are now?

Great question. I support the nuclear family when it works. I do not believe it is inherently evil. It’s problematic only when it’s problematic. So I would say that our social ills have a lot of antecedents, and if we want to talk about all of them, I’m willing to have a rational discussion about the current state of affairs. And if nontraditional families should bear a portion of the responsibility, I’m willing to address that. Nontraditional families aren’t inherently better or enlightened. It’s not the configuration that makes the family work, and it’s not the configuration that makes the family problematic. It’s the individuals involved and their approach to intimacy.

Do I think there was ever a golden era? For some, absolutely. But generally, most of the people I know are glad we live now, rather than fifty years ago, when gay people were locked in closets, women couldn’t open their own bank accounts, and it was illegal for people of different “races” to marry.

8. Do you believe that the question addressed in this book—how to be a family—is a particularly American issue? Considering our distinct history, our unique multiethnic makeup, and our particular cultural norms, do you think the American family is somehow essentially different from families elsewhere?

The heterogeneity of our culture makes for a unique set of dynamics. Our national DNA includes innovation, opportunity, and personal freedom. We have a great sense of entitlement I don’t find in other cultures—we believe we should be able to have it our way. Freedom of religion, freedom of choice, freedom to marry outside our race and class, freedom to live where we choose, again, our national DNA. We aren’t as bound to the demographic of our birth as most people are around the world.

9. How do you think the way Americans conceive of the family will continue to change and evolve in the future? What do you predict the American family will look like in fifty years? In a hundred years?

We are going to see more and more experimentation in response to changes on the ground. Dwindling resources, constant migration, species survival, increased globalism, increased infertility in the Western world, changing public policy, shifts in spiritual experiences and expectations, the increasing reliance on the Web, and a dozen other forces I can’t predict will invite humans to relate to each other in myriad ways.

The American family will continue to both change and stay the same. The nuclear model works well for many, and I predict we’ll see more tweaking of that model—the gay version, the intercultural version, etc. But the American family will also look more and more tribal, or clan-like with deeper ties to extended families and friends. It will have more members, connected by blood or belief or necessity. We will also see greater mobility, so more families than ever will span continents, not just states.

In these extended groupings, skin color, socioeconomic status and what gender one likes to have sex with will matter less and less. Reliability, selflessness, the ability to cooperate, to share, to be vulnerable, to put the emotional well-being of children first—these will matter most.