Late last year, the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. released the results of a survey which had asked Americans how they define “family.”
Almost 90 percent of those surveyed said that a single parent and child is a family. Eighty percent said that an unmarried couple living together with a child is a family. Just over 60 percent of respondents said that when a gay or lesbian couple is raising a child, they’re family.
How do you define family? Should the term only refer to a married man and woman who are raising children? Are our notions of what is family changing as we witness the emergence of new family constellations such as same sex parents, stepchildren, adopted children, transracial families, and grandparents raising and serving as legal guardians to their grandchildren?
I remember years ago, friends of mine announced the adoption of their first child with a beautiful card in which the words “Now We Are Family” were elegantly printed. By then they had been married for more than a decade; I had always thought of the two of them as a family. I was delighted for them and for their new daughter, but at the same time, I remember thinking:
“How would I feel about receiving this announcement if I were married, but childless? What if I’d never wanted children? Or couldn’t conceive? Or didn’t have the desire or resources to adopt? Would I wonder, ‘Do people not think of my husband and me as, truly, family because we don’t have children?’”
I think it would have troubled me.
But I’m not childless. I have three children by birth and one by adoption. I’m blessed with an array of friends who are making their own unique families in all of the constellations mentioned above and more.
I discovered – and fell in love with — Erma Bombeck’s definition of family a few years ago. Bombeck wrote, “We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.”
That seems like a good definition of family to me – and quite true to what life is like with children.
Yes, my youngest child has much darker skin than the rest of us and different birth parents than my other kids. Sure, she was born in a different country. Obviously she doesn’t – as one stranger once said – “match” the rest of the family.
But we are a perfect match. We’re family. And yes, she and her sister sometimes lock each other out of the room they share. They wrestle, whisper to each other at night and lean into each other companionably when they’re watching a movie on the couch. My son rushes in when one of my daughters talks about a boy being unkind to her in the lunch line at school. “What? Who? What did he do?” my son says, threatening to show up at the grade school with his lacrosse stick. In the next moment the same son might sneak a piece of gum from his sister’s stash and when she notices, she’ll protest: “Mom!”
I think, for those of us with kids, Erma Bombeck had it right. All six of us are indeed a “strange little band of characters” and I know none of us would trade our family for any other one in the whole wide world.
Even if we were promised better desserts.
Jennifer Grant is a journalist in the Chicago area. Her memoir, Love You More: The Divine Surprise of Adopting My Daughter will be released this summer from Thomas Nelson publishers.
