I tried to invent family

Because I didn't know what it meant

When I was in my 20s, my friend introduced me to the idea that I could choose my family. That family could be created from the bonds of friendships and lovers. That was the same year we had a friends-giving. We were living in a college town where there was no shortage of young people who weren’t going home for the holidays. My friend and I hosted, and I believe we tackled making the turkey. All of our 12 guests brought something. It was a big adventure and gloriously fun. We didn’t even burn the turkey.

After that experience, the idea of creating family seemed completely legitimate. Not to mention deeply appealing. My friend had still-married parents and three siblings but she told me that they were very messed up, and told me some dreadful stories. Little did I know how bad it had actually been. It’s no wonder she wanted to choose her family.

I had my own reasons.

Almost all of my friends in childhood had siblings and/or two parents. Only one of my friends was like me, the single child of a single mother. Sally, at least, had grandparents who were only a couple hours away on the Jersey shore. My grandfather was dead before I was born, and my grandmother died when I was seven after suffering for years from a broken hip and dementia. She, and two of my three uncles were 450 miles away in Maine. I had an aunt near Boston and another uncle and cousins 200 miles away in State College. I saw my extended family a couple of times a year and my father not at all until I was 14.

I longed for a family. Even though my friends all envied me my lack of siblings, they had no idea what they gained by having continuous access to people who were teaching them how to cope with other annoying humans. A skill I definitely lacked. Unlike most of Gen X, I was thin-skinned, and unused to people being mean to me. Unfortunately, that made me a prime target for harassment in junior high school.

Even though I was raised by a single mother, I still imagined myself with a husband and a couple of kids. But looking back on it, my vision had no solidity. How could it? I didn’t know what a good man looked like. So much of what we learn about how to live in the world and how to have relationships we get from our parents. However flawed it may be, before no fault divorce was common, marriage was considered the normal state. Even as a child, I could see that my mother being divorced was unusual and not necessarily desirable.

I’m not sure when my mother became an angry feminist. But it was some time after her divorce from my badly-chosen father. Her mistakes morphed into blaming men for her poor choices. She passed that anger and suspicion on to me.

This attitude was a seriously poor way to find a partner. And while I toyed with the idea that I might be bisexual when I was younger, my attraction to men was a reality. However, my ideas about how men worked were purely fictional. Fictional both from my mothers ideas, and from literally, science-fiction.

Fiction was my escape from the misery of junior high school. I’ve always been a big reader, which was partly the result of my mother reading to me as a child, and partly due to the isolation that I grew up with. The inside of my head was [is] a very busy place. One of the first writers of science fiction I loved wrote about large family units. It sounded wonderful.

The problem, was that this particular writer was writing about group marriages. The characters were very happy, and therefore when I read about those situations I was very happy. Fiction is a way for us to experience something that we would never have a chance to otherwise. I had no real family on which to base what my life should look like. Fiction filled that void.

But I had no idea that male jealousy is a perfectly natural biological response to sperm competition. The group marriages that this author was writing about were wholly unrealistic. The family that I thought I could create, wasn’t possible. At least not in the way I was imagining.

In the course of my search, I spent some time in the polyamory community. [In hindsight ‘community’ is a bit of an overblown word for a bunch of people who are thinking about dating each other.] Polyamory means multiple loves.

The other unrealistic thing was that I didn’t understand was how much work a relationship actually is. I didn’t learn that until I got married and raised a mentally ill stepdaughter. Our time is limited. Forming a deep relationship with more than one person during the same time frame is almost impossible. At least partly because while a normal relationship has a specific focus, a polyamorous relationship is, at best, scattered. There is no small amount of time spent negotiating with not just the potential partner but with their partners, because everyone has to feel good about something we didn’t evolve with.

In theory, this brings everyone closer, and it can feel that way, at least for a while. But of all the polyamorous people that I met, I know of one stable triad that has lasted. They don’t have children. Children were definitely part of my vision for family.

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This idea of creating family ignores how humans have been doing business for hundreds of thousands of years. It ignores evolution and biology. But that wasn’t my only problem. Having had a very poor example of manhood for a father, I didn’t tend to choose any better than my mother had. At least, sometimes.

The guys that I felt strongly emotional about were all thoroughly inappropriate for me and probably inappropriate for anyone. At least one of them was a domestic abuser. This is what happens when girls don’t have a good father. While I can’t speak to this directly, I don’t imagine having a bad mother is any good for boys either.

If my mother failed to prepare me for my life, at least she wasn’t toxic. She wasn’t a drinker, she made sure that I was fed and housed. She gave me the gift of making sure that I had excellent grammar and took me to lots of museums and historical monuments. If she had no good judgment about men, at least she didn’t drink, do, drugs, or have mental illness that led her to play mind games with her offspring, as was the case with my friend.

Conservatives routinely cite the value of a strong family unit. Having lived without one, and, at last, seeing the effect on my life, I support this. I get excited when I see young people deciding to get married and have children. I grieve that my stepson has already decided not to have children, and that my stepdaughter is in no shape to do so and never will be.

I might have been one of the few children of divorce in my school, but since the 70s, that’s become incredibly common. We have two generations of people who are scarred by divorce. A generation of women decided that finding themselves was more important than raising their families. Because yeah, it was mostly the women that want to divorce. That was the message of feminism: a woman’s feelings were more important than anything else, more important than her children, and more important than her marriage. In my mother’s case, my father was a mean alcoholic, who abused me. [Although she didn’t know about that last part until much later.] But this wasn’t the case for most women. If it was, the human species would not have survived.

What I didn’t know in my 20s was that family requires commitment. Not just a commitment that two people make to each other, but a commitment made in front of community. Community isn’t just a group of people that all hang out together. Community is the people who will show up for you when you’re sick, when your family is in financial need, or when someone’s house burns down. Being part of a community means you show up for these things too.

In my 20s none of us had any money to loan each other, and none of us had any major crises. We were a group of friends but we weren’t family, however fond we were of each other. However fun that Thanksgiving was, I don’t now remember all of the participants, and I certainly haven’t spoken to any of them but my co-hostess since 1988.

When I married, I committed to my new family. For better or worse. And we had worse. However, my husband’s siblings may not have understood the depth of my step-daughter’s problems, but they were supportive and caring. I didn’t get the family I thought I wanted. I got something better. I got the family I needed. I’m a better person for it.

I’ve looked for and found guidance in making my life better. Here are some newsletters that might make yours better.

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Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. She lives with her husband, and is Mother of Cats; three boyz. Selina has written The Young Woman’s Goodlife Guide: Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 20. Or… Learn From My Pain, and How to Train Your Cat: Using a Clicker and Leash to Keep Your Indoor Cat Happy and Healthy, the Goodlife Guide to Nutrition, and The Storytellers: a Journey of Discovery.