Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [39]
As she worked on her issues, Franchesca became an advocate for the Native American students at her mostly white junior high. She decided to challenge all racist remarks. She pushed for more Native American literature and history.
At our last meeting Franchesca was dressed in blue jeans and a woven Native American blouse. Betty and Lloyd sat proudly on either side of her, Lloyd in his white pharmacist jacket and Betty in a polyester pants suit. Lloyd said, “I’ve learned to speak a few words of Lakota.” Betty said, “This research has opened a new world for us.”
Franchesca said, “I belong to two families, one white and one brown. But there is room in the sacred hoop for all my relatives.”
Franchesca is an example of how complicated family life can be in the 1990s. At fourteen she was dealing with race and adoption issues as well as issues around alcohol, sex, religion and school. She was searching for an identity and distancing from her parents by rebelling and keeping secrets. Yet she loved her parents and needed their support. She looked mildly delinquent, but her behavior was really a signal about the struggle within to find herself.
So Franchesca and her family were “up to their ears in alligators,” as Lloyd put it. Fortunately the family sought help. They turned out to be an affectionate family with about the right mix of structure and flexibility. The parents had rules and expectations and the energy to enforce them, but they also had the ability to grow and change as their daughter changed. When they realized that Franchesca needed more contact with her people, they developed an interest in Native American customs. They had some tolerance for diversity, even of religious beliefs. With time and effort on everyone’s part, things settled down. Franchesca was on her way to having her own identity and yet she remained connected to her parents. She explored who she was, but not in ways that were self-destructive.
At the Whitney Biennial Art Show, I stood before a tableau entitled “Family Romance.” Four figures—a mother, father, son and daughter—stood naked in a row. They were baby-doll shapes of spongy tan material and real hair. They were all the same height and the same level of sexual development. I interpreted this work as a comment on life in the 1990s. To me it said: “There is no childhood anymore and no adulthood either. Kids aren’t safe and adults don’t know what they are doing.”
When we think of families, most of us think of the traditional family, with a working father and a mother who stays home with the children, at least until they go to school. In reality, only 14 percent of our families are this way. Family demographics have changed radically since the 1970s, when less than 13 percent of all families were headed by single parents. In 1990, 30 percent of all families were headed by single parents. (Mothers are the parents in 90 percent of single-parent homes.)
Our culture has yet to acknowledge the reality of these figures. In the 1990s a family can be a lesbian couple and their children from previous marriages, a fourteen-year-old and her baby in a city apartment, a gay man and his son, two adults recently married and their teenagers from other relationships, a grandmother with twin toddlers of a daughter who has died of AIDS, a foster mother and a crack baby, a multigener-ational family from an Asian culture or unrelated people who are together because they love each other.
Whatever the composition of families, in this last half of the twentieth century, families are under siege. Parents are more likely to be overworked, overcommitted, tired and poor. They are less likely to have outside support.
Money is a problem. We have become an increasingly stratified society with some children living in a luxurious world of designer clothes, computer games, private schools and camps, while other children walk dangerous streets to inadequate schools.
Time is a problem. Studies show that the average couple talks to each other twenty-nine minutes a week; the average