High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [56]
Look at us, we are saying to each other. This is really happening. This amazing and joyful noise that has got all those people jammed together and sweating and howling and bumping and grinding is coming from us. We are here, right now. We are the ones.
STONE SOUP
In the catalog of family values, where do we rank an occasion like this? A curly-haired boy who wanted to run before he walked, age seven now, a soccer player scoring a winning goal. He turns to the bleachers with his fists in the air and a smile wide as a gap-toothed galaxy. His own cheering section of grown-ups and kids all leap to their feet and hug each other, delirious with love for this boy. He’s Andy, my best friend’s son. The cheering section includes his mother and her friends, his brother, his father and stepmother, a stepbrother and stepsister, and a grandparent. Lucky is the child with this many relatives on hand to hail a proud accomplishment. I’m there too, witnessing a family fortune. But in spite of myself, defensive words take shape in my head. I am thinking: I dare anybody to call this a broken home.
Families change, and remain the same. Why are our names for home so slow to catch up to the truth of where we live?
When I was a child, I had two parents who loved me without cease. One of them attended every excuse for attention I ever contrived, and the other made it to the ones with higher production values, like piano recitals and appendicitis. So I was a lucky child too. I played with a set of paper dolls called “The Family of Dolls,” four in number, who came with the factory-assigned names of Dad, Mom, Sis, and Junior. I think you know what they looked like, at least before I loved them to death and their heads fell off.
Now I’ve replaced the dolls with a life. I knit my days around my daughter’s survival and happiness, and am proud to say her head is still on. But we aren’t the Family of Dolls. Maybe you’re not, either. And if not, even though you are statistically no oddity, it’s probably been suggested to you in a hundred ways that yours isn’t exactly a real family, but an impostor family, a harbinger of cultural ruin, a slapdash substitute—something like counterfeit money. Here at the tail end of our century, most of us are up to our ears in the noisy business of trying to support and love a thing called family. But there’s a current in the air with ferocious moral force that finds its way even into political campaigns, claiming there is only one right way to do it, the Way It Has Always Been.
In the face of a thriving, particolored world, this narrow view is so pickled and absurd I’m astonished that it gets airplay. And I’m astonished that it still stings.
Every parent has endured the arrogance of a child-unfriendly grump sitting in judgment, explaining what those kids of ours really need (for example, “a good licking”). If we’re polite, we move our crew to another bench in the park. If we’re forthright (as I am in my mind, only, for the rest of the day), we fix them with a sweet imperious stare and say, “Come back and let’s talk about it after you’ve changed a thousand diapers.”
But it’s harder somehow to shrug off the Family-of-Dolls Family Values crew when they judge (from their safe distance) that divorced people, blended families, gay families, and single parents are failures. That our children are at risk, and the whole arrangement is messy and embarrassing. A marriage that ends is not called “finished,” it’s called failed. The children of this family may have been born to a happy union, but now they are called the children of divorce.
I had no idea how thoroughly these assumptions overlaid my culture until I went through divorce myself. I wrote to a friend: “This might be worse than being widowed. Overnight I’ve suffered the same losses—companionship, financial and practical support, my identity as a wife and partner, the future I’d taken for granted. I am lonely, grieving, and hard-pressed to take care of my household alone. But instead of bringing