Ask Ellie: I don’t have a nuclear family. How can I feel OK about that?
Dear Ellie,
A TV show recently gave me a new experience of seeing a single mom and child as a whole family unit, and it’s kinda changing everything for what I feel is possible for my family. While there seems to be a dearth of compelling single parenting stories that don’t just end with the parent getting remarried, I find myself still looking for examples to be inspired by as well as a simple process for carving our own way in confidence. Can you help with any of this?
From,
Not the Nuclear Family
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Dear NtNF
I’m so glad you wrote, and especially right before Christmas, when the tyranny of the perfect family is at its most punishing. And especially this Christmas, when Covid is siloing us all off into our discrete domestic units. No jolly mixing of households. No room for one more at the table.
Which is especially hard if you live in the “incorrect” formation of family: namely, anything other than a mum, dad, and a couple of able-bodied children, with perhaps a Labrador thrown in if you’re feeling wild. As, from the sounds of it, you well know, the idea that this is the “correct” family unit is so pervasive — at least in the US and the UK — that it can come to feel like natural law.
Which, frankly, sucks, since there’s nothing natural or necessary about it. Did you know that the word “family” has meant so many things through the ages that anthropologists can’t even agree on what one is? In Britain, there were many centuries when “family” meant all the people who lived in one household, including the servants. In indigenous cultures, families have typically extended way beyond the household, so that, for instance, a person’s very spouse can be designated as a member of another family altogether. And in communities of African-American slaves, kinship ties formed independent of blood relations kept people alive, in body and soul.
Please excuse the history lesson. What I’m trying to say is: family structure is a mirror. It reflects the needs and priorities of the society it springs from. The tyranny of the two-child nuclear family reflects a society that worships at the shrines of the individual and the dollar. This insular structure conveniently denies the need for a supportive social and economic infrastructure by placing the responsibility for raising healthy, productive children solely at the feet of the parents (and never before with so much shame, such focus on the quality of one’s “parenting”). It keeps the consumer economy afloat, since it requires every family to have their own blender and lawnmower instead of pooling resources.
And it makes an awful lot of people feel awfully shitty about themselves. In fact, I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone (at least in cisgender, heterosexual circles) who hasn’t either fretted about achieving this archetype of alleged perfection, or got there (often after fighting tooth and nail to do so), then found themselves, at times, feeling suffocated or alone or both.
I’m not saying that there’s anything inherently wrong with two parents having two children and living in a house together. It has its logic. I’m sure as a single parent you are worn to the bare bone by this stage of the pandemic, and you’d love to be able to storm out into the night and tell someone else to make the fucking dinner for once.
It’s the pervasiveness of the model that’s the problem — the way it’s become a benchmark of success. The fact that it’s led you to see your own family as somehow incomplete instead of specifically and perfectly yours.
Does it help to know that none less than Leto, the Greek goddess of motherhood, was effectively a single parent? After Zeus knocked her up, his wife Hera chased her from land to land, refusing to allow her to give birth anywhere on terra firma. Eventually, she washed up on the floating island of Delos and gave birth to two children, Artemis (goddess of hunting, wild nature, and chastity) and Apollo. Yes, that Apollo. So this idea that only the nuclear family can produce successful, strong children is certainly not in the DNA of Western culture.
My favourite thing about Leto is that she forced the earth to accept her. A floating rock like Delos was not an auspicious place to give birth, but she spoke to the land and told it of the great things to come to whichever place she birthed her divine babies. Thanks to her persuasion, Delos became a fixed island, secured with four pillars. And not just any island but Apollo’s sacred ground.
I see single mothers do this every day: create sacred spaces for their families, through sheer force of will and love. In a way, every family is a country, a land of its own, and they don’t all have to be France. What are the gloriously specific customs and traditions, dialects and laws in the nation of your family? Hold tight to those specifics — they’re the stuff of life, and they weigh far heavier than the theory that your nation state should have more members.
And always remember: perfection is a mirage. Wherever you find the illusion of perfection, there’s typically something wrong or rotten on the inside. European folklore is full of stories of kings and queens of apparently perfect lands who have everything they want — except for a child. They rule with perfect justice and carry out their duties to the letter, but the rooms of their palace echo, empty. It’s normally an old crone who steps in, crossing paths with the queen in the woods and finding some way to crack her perfect facade, to bring her down to wallow in the mud and guts of reality. After this encounter, miraculously, she has a child.
Why am I telling you this? You’re not trying to conceive, true — but it sounds to me like you are birthing yourself and your family. You’re done emptying yourself out, trying to blend in, reaching for someone else’s idea of perfection. You’re ready to give birth to the real, embodied, lived truth of your family: piss, shit, blood and all. Welcome to the world! I think your family deserves a naming party, a Christening, or however else you’d celebrate a new arrival. I mean it: throw a party for yourselves to celebrate being exactly as you are.
And when you’re done celebrating, ponder this: if family structure is a mirror of our priorities, what do you want yours to reflect about you? I’m going to guess it’s not the importance of the individual and the dollar. Do you want your family to include your closest friends, to stretch across multiple households, to be an embodiment and incantation of wild love for your whole neighbourhood? What’s the currency in your country? Practical jokes? Stories? Laughter? In London, it’s still officially illegal to shake your rug out of the window before 8am or “handle salmon under suspicious circumstances” (yeah, idk). Draw yourself a bill of rights and create your own utopia. Nobody gets to set the rules here except you and your family. (I mean, you probably shouldn’t murder anyone, but you get the gist.)
And next time you feel like you’re floating on a rock somewhere far off the promised land, remember that you are Leto, goddamnit. You don’t need a place in the promised land, where perfection rules and everyone has to keep their lawn mowed. You’ve already made your own country. The force of your will and your love make the ground beneath you sacred.
Love,
Ellie
