Miss Rants

Mama had lots of crazy rules. I think she probably still does; I just get to ignore more of them by virtue of being on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. At any rate, one rule she did not have was an insistence that my sister and I form some sort of crazy playground alliance. Wait, hear me out. Lots of the kids in the neighbourhood had parents who had such expectations. Their children were to act as some sort of cohesive unit which would always follow the same party line throughout the ups and downs of childhood diplomacy and warfare. But Mama never said that we had to agree with each other, that we had to be on the same side. She insisted that choose the right side, regardless of our biological affinity to our comrades. Certainly, she would have been thrilled if we fought less with each other (and as a side note I would argue that today as adults Jackie and I are much closer than most siblings); but she never forced us to arbitrarily side with one another.

I never thought much about it at the time. I knew my family was “different” as a result of my parents’ unrestrained eccentricities. But difference was not the product of eccentricity; it highlighted an enormous ideological gap between my mother and all the others in our corner of the world: a definition of family that was radically different. While the soccer moms in their mini-vans taught their children that family was small, static, and tribal, my mother taught me a definition of family that was vast, dynamic, and universal. Two anthropology classes, one my senior year of high school and another my freshman year of college, repeated my mother’s lesson in a very scholastic way: There is not just one way to organize kinship. Each culture’s definition of family is largely a product of history, environment, and chance.

And so with Mama and Margaret Mead telling me the same thing, I have come to reject the vision of family presented to me by the American Family Association, television, and my primary school playmates. Mama was right all along. The bonds of genes and marriage licenses are nice enough, but there are other ties that bind that our just as powerful. The re-imagining of the family as something wider than its mid-20th century poster image is an action that is simultaneously traditional in the extreme (why does no one seem to remember that the “nuclear” in “nuclear family” refers to the “Nuclear Age”?) and revolutionary. When we come to redefine the family, we can begin the project of reorganizing human relationships in ways that are more egalitarian. We can strike a crippling blow to tribalism and expectionalism. We claim the idea and practice of community.

Jackie (the aforementioned sister) is the most likely kidney donor I have in the world. She is also my best friend, if the truth is told. But Mama never forced us to be arbitrary allies, because family is not a weapon to yield against the imagined “Other”. It is the institution by which we can ever widen the circle of Us until there is no Them. This though can only happen when the notion of family is freed from the Us on the playground and beyond.