Recently, I was watching Big Love on HBO (as many CCers are wont to do), and feeling kind of warm and fuzzy about the Henricksen family: husband, three wives, seven children, and one more on the way (thanks, Margene). Yes, it takes a lot of planning, faith, and not a little Viagra to make it all work out, but this post-modern all-American family behind the white picket fence(s) is, well, wholesome: loving, generous, kind, supportive of one another. Indeed, the Henricksens are to the new millennium what the nuclear Nelsons were to the 50s and the blended Bradys were to the 70s: a reflection of life not as it is, but as we would arguably want it to be. So what does Big Love tell us about our conceptions of family in post-modern, post-millennial America? I think it reveals quite a bit, and most of it is quite positive.
First, family has gone far beyond what the state once envisioned as the “nuclear” model of father, mother, and 2.3 children. Too many of us grew up with parents who divorced, with single parents, with stepparents in the picture.
By the 2000 US Census, the term “household” included married couple households, single-parent households, and non-married couple households. That the government should recognize that a household is no longer necessarily (or even predominantly) a working father, married to a stay at home mother, with two or three children under the age of eighteen, all living under the same roof, reflects a significant shift in the cultural views on what constitutes a family. By the turn of the millennium, it no longer raised eyebrows for a woman to raise a child on her own, whether by choice or by necessity, and loving gay families are as much a part of the cultural landscape, particularly in urban areas, as “Mommy and Me” groups and dog runs.
So what is a family in 2007? To some extent, the Henricksens have it right. A family is (and always has been) an ongoing creation – if home is where when you have to go there, they have to take you in, then family are the people who take you in, no matter what. For some people, family is the nucleus of two parents and two or three children, living in a simple home. For others, family is a much larger, multigenerational structure, sometimes living together in a large dwelling, helping one another, getting into one another’s business, and raising generations of children together. For many city dwellers, family is one’s circle of friends, to whom we turn for everything from Sunday brunch to Passover Seders, acting as one another’s advisors in all things from childcare to divorce, and being there for one another in a world that can sometimes overwhelm and frighten even the toughest among us. With or without children, with one parent or two, gay or straight, we all cobble together families as best we can, because, in the end, there is something exceedingly human in our desire, our need, to be a part of a loving and supportive group that will be there for us. The world will change, our society will evolve, but our need for family, that is eternal.
-ysolde
Great article Ysolde! I very much agree with you (about the definition of the modern family) and enjoyed reading what you wrote!