Emily Heist Moss says understanding how broad and beautiful and strange and complicated a “family” can be is the true definition of “pro-family.”
How to define a family: I have two parents and one brother. I also have two step-parents. I have one grandmother, one godfather, two aunts, three uncles, and cousins—step-cousins, half-cousins, second cousins—numbering in the high 30s. Or 40s, I’m really not sure. Some of them I call my friends, some of them I wouldn’t recognize on the street, and some of them I’ve never met. There was a cousin given up for adoption in the mid-’70s who could be anywhere, anyone. My family is as scattered as scattered can be.
I live a thousand miles away from my parents, and 250 miles from the closest person who shares my blood. That kind of geographical distance can’t help but create an information gap. Every time I go back east, my family asks if I’ve dyed my hair. Nope, I say, this is just the color that it is now. The daughter they remember as a towheaded child and a dirty blonde teenager is a solid brunette, even if they didn’t witness that slow evolution. Is that a new dress? My mother asks when I get off the plane. No, I say, pretty old actually. There are friends they’ve never met, boyfriends who came and went, projects at work opened and shut that they didn’t hear about.
The people I’m closest to every day—the ones who notice when I change my nail color, who know the story of each date that doesn’t become a relationship, who hear about the office drama, who know where my mind is at on any given subject—are they not my family? What is blood anyway? When you pick a place so far from “home” to put down roots, you have to make a little family of your own. When you need to be picked up, literally, after a break-up, who do you call? When you’re loopy and medicated after your wisdom teeth have been extracted, who walks you home? With whom do you spend your birthdays, mark special occasions, celebrate good times?
I ask these questions because I am in my 20s and I am watching some friends begin to pair off while others shudder at the words “settle down.” Most of us are in limbo, between blood family—the one you didn’t get to choose—and spouse, the family you hand-pick and mold as you go. Some friends are having babies on purpose, some by accident. Some queer friends are idly pondering what paths they will pursue if and when they want children. Some friends are trying to have babies and can’t, beginning a long, exhausting slog through fertility treatments. To them, these questions about what makes a family are no longer hypothetical. What if the egg isn’t yours? What about the sperm? Or the womb? What if all of it comes from someone else? What if there are no children and never will be? Is that still a “family”?
You might say that it doesn’t matter what we call it, but in this political landscape, where “pro-family” is code for “pro-a-certain-kind-of-family,” words do matter. When Mitt Romney casually muses to gay rights activists, “I didn’t know you had families,” it does matter. How we label each other defines how we view each other, and how we view each other defines how we treat each other, and we need to treat each other better. The first step is to understand how broad and beautiful and strange and complicated a “family” can be. That’s what “pro-family” really means.
If we survey the landscape of modern America, the majority of households are not shaped like Leave it to Beaver. Single parenthood, same-sex couples, children raised by grandparents and relatives, couples without children, single people—the census does not look like what conservatives would like to believe it should. Instead of trying to inflict a model based on Biblical misinterpretation or a warped perception of world history, we need to open our eyes to the myriad family structures that exist. We need to build policies around the way people actually live, instead of the way some people wish they lived.
In a 1989 Time interview, Toni Morrison said, “Two parents can’t raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community—everybody—to raise a child…And the little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn’t work…Why we are hanging onto it, I don’t know. It isolates people into little units—people need a larger unit.” I don’t agree that the nuclear family model doesn’t work, but I know for damn sure that it’s not the only viable model to produce happy, healthy people.
I saw a documentary recently, Una y Carne, about a pair of transgendered Puerto Rican women living in New York. When you watch these women take care of each other, see how they talk about each other, how they support each other, there’s no other word for it than “family.” They are not lovers. They are not married. They do not have children together, but anything less than “family” would be an insult to their commitment and devotion to each other.
I don’t know what my family will look like through the coming decades. I know I will have those relatives I listed at the start of this essay. If they read this, most of them will probably hate it, but we are tied by shared history, if not shared politics, and that can’t be undone. But what else will my family have? A spouse? Maybe. Children? I hope so. Friends with whom I can travel and laugh and talk for hours? Damn straight.
After all, there’s no wrong way to make a family.
Emily Heist Moss is a New Englander in love with Chicago, where she works in a tech start-up. She blogs every day about gender, media, politics and sex at Rosie Says, and has written for Jezebel, The Frisky, The Huffington Post and The Good Men Project. Find her on Facebook and Twitter.
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