Holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas are typically times when families celebrate together. Big meals are cooked and eaten, stories and gifts exchanged, photo albums hauled out and both naps and chaos reign. In the “Norman Rockwell” image of the holidays Mom proudly cooks a big turkey, Dad expertly carves it and the smiling kids all eagerly await their heaping plates. Grandma and Grandpa sit contentedly, gazing at their nuclear family with pride and pleasure.
Flip to 2014 and the picture changes – families are not as simple as back in the 1950’s when Rockwell illustrated American life. Today’s families are far more diverse, extended, cross-cultural, blended and multi-ethnic. We don’t think this fact makes families better or worse, just different and admittedly more complex.
Step-parents, half-siblings, same-sex couples, single parents, transgender cousins, surrogate mothers, mixed-race couples and off-spring, unmarrieds living together with their children of previous marriages, ex-spouses; family members now “come in all sizes, shapes and colors.” Scheduling is more complicated, as the holiday desires of extended family members are considered. Families meet before, during or after the holiday depending upon everyone’s availability and other commitments. And the English language is having a devil-of-a-time keeping up with all this; we simply lack terms to describe family members now playing important roles which previously were not recognized as legitimate. Thus we have families with two “mommies” or two “daddies.”
There are some people who continue to believe that the only legitimate or healthy form of family contains a legally married man and woman and their kids; historically this has been called the nuclear family. But just as the discoveries of nuclear particle physics required the recognition and naming of quarks (up, down and strange for example) so the American family has recognized new members of the nuclear family. And just as all sub-atomic particles have their opposite anti-matter particle (the electron and the positron, for example) families now legitimately include opposites and realms of parallel validity.
The common element in this analogy is love, for it’s love that binds a family together just as forces of attraction bind the atom. Love, of course, need not be restricted to families, but for most of us it’s where the experience of love is first found and accordingly the love of family is powerful. Extending from this experience of familial love emanates love of friends, community and even country. Love, that invisible yet undeniably powerful force is like gravity, exerting its influence over us constantly. When love is ever-present we often take it for granted, but if entirely forgotten loneliness follows.
We think it’s love that makes families, not rules by government or others about who or what qualifies, and we approve of the growing acceptance of new and broader forms of marriages and families. Of course, in an ultimate sense we are all part of one big family, the family of humankind, and like all families we argue, disagree and sometimes treat each other badly. Yet who among us would disagree that if we can but harness the love of each other as family the world would be far better off. We are not, admittedly, the first to suggest this.
In that spirit we wish health, safety and all good things for our Sonoma Valley family, and that together we find and enjoy ways to be honest yet loving, strong yet gentle, and caring yet wise.
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