Last week my daughter drew a picture of her family. I had given her and her friends a box of chalks and they were drawing all over the walls in the laneway behind our house which we are slightly trying to claim as an extension of our back yard. Our cats, who currently claim it as their turf, are our main nemesis.
The drawing was in amongst others of trees, rainbows and Homer Simpson (because, fantastically, we have entered our The Simpsons era).
The people she had drawn live between four houses. Some of them are not her blood relatives, or even related by marriage. But they are her immediate family as she understands it, even though they live in different homes.
From a young age, this has been the way of thinking for us when it came to family. I raised her to understand that her immediate family went beyond she and I, the person with whom she lived. In the late days of the pandemic, I remember asking my GP, who knows us all, if it was ok for us to go back and forth between my parents’ house, who live about ten minutes away. Sure you’re all basically the one household anyway, he told me, understanding entirely the situation.
Alongside father/grandfather/grandmother/uncles/aunt there are also people to whom we are not related but who feel familial.
Paola, our magnificent childminder, flashes of whose personality I see regularly in my child, so fundamental was she to raising her in her early years.
Sophie, my friend, her husband and their three boys. I love her boys as I would nephews, although I’ve never thought to give them that title.
I wanted my daughter to understand family as a porous, mutable, expanding thing, sprawling and growing, rather than something that was rigid, one way, or not at all.
One of the good things about separation isn’t a sentence you typically use, but if you find yourself in this situation, some good things that might not otherwise have happened do. One of them is that you are dependent on people who don’t live under your roof more than you might otherwise have been. That can mean that on occasion these relationships deepen to becoming familial.
Sometimes people will remark about a separation in front of you, so sad, with the inevitable pitying head tilt, and then glance guiltily your way because they’ve just remembered that you too are separated.
And yes of course it is sad (as are lots of things in life). But I could never get on board with the idea of the broken family. That’s not because of my experience of being in a so-called-broken-family. I guess this could sound a little the-divorced-woman-doth-protest-too-much, but honestly I don’t believe in the idea of an unbroken family in the first place.
Even before you get to the broken part, I find the idea of there being a before, a perfect, non-broken family, sort of nonsensical. Families are full of people, people are inherently broken at different times, just by life. The ide of a pre-divorce utopia seems, well, a denial of reality.
There’s also the fact that one set of people declaring one kind of family more valid than any other is extremely arrogant.
Unless of course they’re JD Vance and his ilk, and then, well, how predictable, because family is simply another way of weaponizing a word in order to control others. And by others I obviously mean women.
A group of humans, closely related, comprising a break-free entity? Please. A perfect, non-broken unit as a description of family seems like a definition created by a person who has never actually existed within a family. Families are full of broken people, because most of us at one time or another are going to break, and then (hopefully) recover.
Family itself though is amorphous. It’s an umbrella term, not a specific mathematical equation with only one outcome. You marry into it, or you become such an essential to someone that you go beyond friendship and become familial. You create it with one other person, or many. Or your pet. You have kids or you don’t. Nobody else gets to tell you what your family looks like, they’re all valid.
At times people are broken within a family. Or not broken. But families themselves are elastic, they change. Re-form. They don’t break, and stay forever broken.
When I first became a single parent, I would collect examples of others in the same situation, sometimes to comfort myself, on occasion to bring back to my daughter to drop in her lap, casually, in passing, a way of saying look, others are like this too, and it’s all ok. I still do it occasionally, only recently, did you know Taylor Swift’s parents are divorced?
Casual.
The first of these was my aunt, a single parent since I was born. When we were little, she would sometimes mind my brother and I after school, with her own child, our cousin. I still remember the sense of cosiness in her house, jam on McCambridges toast (exciting because we happened not to have it in our house), watching the (black and white version of) The Adams Family. When I too became a single parent, I thought immediately of the family home she had created, that sense of cosiness, and knew that was the blueprint for what I wanted to create now for my child.
I’ve just finished reading a book about one of the most famous of families, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women they Destroyed by Maureen Callahan. It was compelling, in a sort of Vanity Fair long read way, but also horrifying, one of those books from which you need to take an occasional break. Being a woman of the Kennedy family, or a woman who had contact even with a Kennedy, was grim.
According to Callahan, women could expect anything from being lobotomised (at the instruction of their own father, Joseph Kennedy), being abandoned by your family because you had married a man they deemed wrong, gaslit to the point of your mental health shattering, becoming the object of bitter jealousy if you yourself became too successful at courting the public during your Kennedy husband’s election campaign, cheated on in your own bed, paid to stay with your Kennedy husband, abandoned after miscarriage, used to conceal the less appealing qualities your Kennedy husband possessed, abandoned to die or suffer life-changing injuries, or actually die, because of a Kennedy man’s carelessness in a vehicle.
Jackie Kennedy only really flourished when she away from the lot of the and forged her own career in publishing.
You read this book, and realise most of this is out there already, and yet that family of famous men, an occasional woman allowed in the spotlight, are still held up as a shining dynasty to be admired.
Despite the best efforts of their latest presidential offering, the appalling RFK junior, who, according to Callahan’s book, was as a husband the stuff of nightmares. Despite the reality, that underneath the carapace of good hair, natty suits, all those healthy toothy smiles and tales of sporty family weekends at the compound, was a group of people who were at best deeply competitive with each other, at worst, brutal to fellow members of their family, a family of men all focused on the achievement of power, their own. And yet held up, as an example of familyhood, a generational dynasty. A patriarchal dynasty.
You read it, and realise that the idea of the broken family is often used when the patriarchal family model disbands, and a matriarchal one takes its place.
If anyone or anything is broken, it is these men.
Yes to all of this! If everyone were to know the possibility of a more expansive version of the term ‘family’ then the world would be a better place. I’ve learned so much more about family and community from being separated than I did when I was in a lonely, isolated marriage unit.
I just finished James Patterson's book about the Kennedys yesterday and this exact thought struck me throughout. Any woman unfortunately enough to come into contact with them - and therevwere many - was either abused, gaslit, forved into submission or humiliated - sometimes all four. How those horrible men, with their intergenerational misogyny and the matriarchs with their internalised misogyny could be held up as a example of anything positive is sickening. Broken is not the word.