In the 1970s my wife and I worked with kids with intellectual disabilities – everyone still called it “mental retardation” back then and many people took their doctor’s advice and put their kids “away.”

At River View, a small institution outside Philadelphia, “going home” was all the kids talked about. And it wasn't memories that kept the flame alive: some of them - like Alyse, one of the TeePee Girls, whose wrists had been broken years before and never set properly - had nothing but bad times to remember. No, home was something deeper than memory; it was something akin to order or justice - they'd been turned out before their time; nothing could go on until that wrong was addressed.

All the kids talked about going home; there was one little boy, though, who had a different twist: he wanted to go home all right - but maybe he was confused about what exactly the word "home" meant.

". . . with you," he always added. "I go home with you?"

This was Aaron. Or as he pronounced it, "Addie . . . Addie Rikkerds." Aaron Richards.

"I go home with you?"

This was the way it was gonna be. He was a little boy obsessed. If he was outside and a car he didn't recognize came up the drive, he was uncontrollable. He would break from his group - he was one of the Wigwam Boys - and run to the driver's window, often not bothering to wait for the car to come to a stop.

"I go home with you. I go home," he'd say shielding his eyes and peering in at the driver even before the window was rolled down.

He was seven years old, a wiry little boy in jeans and a striped T-shirt with a smile to melt lead. His black skin was dry and ashen except for the area under his wide nostrils which was alternately wet or crystal-white with dried moisture. And he was in constant motion.

We’d been hired to be house-parents in a group home. We poured over the kids’ records: Aaron’s mother was in a mental health facility; his father was in jail; Aaron had lived in seven or nine or ten foster homes - different social workers had different counts. Finally, he’d been sent out to River View just months before we came ourselves.

Aaron did come to live with us in the group home – but not like the other kids. Our agency, we found out, had made a devil’s pact with the neighbors: OK to the disabilities, as long as none of the kids was black. We went to court and became Aaron’s legal guardians and he came to live with us as part of our “fam-i-ny,” as Aaron says it. And then, years later, when both his mother and his father had passed away, the three of us went to adoption court and made it official.

Karl Williams has published two books with leaders in the self-advocacy movement (the civil rights work of people with intellectual disabilities). His work has appeared in magazines (most recently in Carpe Articulum) and books, as well as on stage, in videos, and on websites; songs from his five CDs have been aired on NBC and Fox and on radio stations around the world. http://www.karlwilliams.com

REINTERPRETING MASTERPIECES: reflections on the non-traditional family

"The family is one of nature's masterpieces."

George Santayan, Life of Reason

‘Las Meninas,’ the 1656 painting by Spanish artist Diego Velázquez, is considered to be one of, if not the, most technically perfect pieces of painting ever produced. At first glance the detail, balance and perspective seem crystal clear. The work is very straight-forwards. However, as one enters the sphere created by this work one imperceptibly slides into illusion and enigma emerging from that very clarity. Ultimately, one is left with the paradox that both the clarity and the enigma are somehow correct. Perhaps that is nature of the dream of life and why Pablo Picasso so radically reinterpreted this masterpiece in 1957.

On the waves of the Revolution of 1968 the nature and role of the family has, like much in Western Civilization, also become radically repainted by some. In addition to cultural forces, the economic activity required to maintain a bourgeois living standard has mobilized many women to work outside the home to a degree that it is now the norm. Both have placed a great deal of stress on the traditional nuclear family. Thus, Western societies are beginning to look again at this masterpiece of nature and ask what it means.

Perhaps the best method for examining this question is to begin with defining the term ‘family’ within a Western context. The family has been understood as the basic unit of a male and female in a monogamous sexual relationship who are the care givers to their offspring. The primary rights and responsibility for these children belong to the parents. This has deep roots, in Rome it was reflected in the infamous patria potestas granting the father the power of life and death over his children.

Much like the masterpiece ‘Las Meninas’ a closer look at this definition reveals that the relationships are not as clear as they appear to be at first glance. The reason for this is that there are two components to this definition: the static roles and the dynamic relationship between them. Further, there has always been a degree of fluidity with both sides of the definition.

Adoption is the classic example. This demonstrates that what marks a family as such is not exclusively genetic since the role of ‘offspring’ is fulfilled by a child not produced by the parents. Yet, he completely fulfills that role.

The key question is: what is the scope of this class ‘family?’ Is a lesbian couple who cohabits for six months and has a cat a family? Conversely, are an older, unmarried couple who take-in a troubled teen without legal formality who then matures and regards them as parents not a family?

I would argue there is a double-line of demarcation that sets the boarder: permanence and self-sacrifice. Both of these are rooted in a deeper emotional attachment than friendship.

The illusion and enigma of the family then becomes that there is a very real possibility that the biological family in which a man was born may not fall within these parameters at all. Yet, he may find substitutes which meet all the criteria in people who are outside of the world in which he was raised.

A center-Right critic might well assert that the fact I had to predicate my previous statement about our theoretical lost boy on the biological family demonstrates the primacy of that form. Whatever close ties he may forge are merely a copy or a substitute for the true family.

But, should the non-traditional family conform to the class of a family as outlines, then it is not a ‘copy’ but is the family in se. If one is operating on the archetype of the Cleavers as a true family then the Bradys are excluded since their relationship is not based on the same narrowly defined genetics as the Cleavers. The family is a spectrum not viewed through blood.

A Left reader with a Postmodernist orientation may take this last sentence as an endorsement of the following view: ‘the family is an artificial social construct with manifold forms. Because it is an arc, no primary metaphysical definition can be enshrined to define it so all familial expressions are equal.’ That reader would be incorrect. To begin with, ‘familial expressions’ can be reduced to the random handshake with a stranger. To argue there are no boarders is to reduce all human creation to dust.

The traditional nuclear family has proven to be a valuable and fundamental institution of Western Civilization. This is likely to continue. Given the social disruption caused by divorce and single-parenthood any attempt to further dismantle it will only yield dismal results. But, like all masterpieces, the family too is subject to reinterpretation. Some may produce banal silk-screen knock offs that (thankfully) will be quickly forgotten, others, a more serious attempt at a full reprinting. In the final analysis, stable and strong non-traditional families where individuals may be cultivated into better moral beings only preserves the institution.

Santiago del Dardano Turann's poetry appeared in issues 8 and 10 of The Externalist.

I Dare You

Most of my childhood friends
came from beautiful homes
ruled by upper-class monsters

A man and a woman got married
had two children –– a boy & a girl ––
The man worked too much. Then

Alcohol. Cocaine. Affluence-
Induced Spousal Abuse;
& Adultery...

She turned a blind eye
It was the 1970s, after all,
It was a black eye.

*

How my parents managed
How they dodged so many bullets
I cannot tell you...

They watched as their friends
Dropped like flies, yet they survived
This year we cheered their 44th anniversary!

Does this seem strange?
Does it seem
Unlikely?

*

My wife & I (and our two daughters),
I pray, will follow in their pious
Footsteps…

I have not kissed –– I mean
Really kissed –– another woman
In twenty years; & believe me
I've been tempted

We avoid social situations
Where drinking is necessary
For anything other than dazzling the palate
Or blessing the Sabbath

*

So if I tell you we are happy,
Does that make us "traditional"?
& if our gay male neighbors adopt

Two little boys from China
& I tell you I am happy for them,
Does that make me a traitor?

How do a man & a woman
procreating & living in fear of g-d
Make a traditional family?

And if you tell me we are actually
Role models, standard bearers,
Why should I believe you,
Why should I take you seriously?

What are you really trying to sell, anyway?
Show me a "traditional family"
& I will show you
a non-traditional family...

The relevant dichotomy might not be between traditional/non-traditional families but between happy/unhappy ones. At checkout yesterday at the local supermarket, I waited behind an anxious stranger whose coupons weren’t making enough of a difference. She chattered with the friendly red-headed cashier and included me in her despair over bad economic times and teenage children who don’t appreciate things as much as past generations did. Then she shocked both cashier and me by revealing bruises on her upper arm as she removed too costly white bread from her order – “It’s not healthy, anyway,” she said – and confessed that her daughter hit her.

When I was a child, how many traditional family secrets did I know? None that Nancy Drew (loved the series, ditto The Hardy Boys) could’ve investigated: (1) my mother refused to marry my father until he’d changed his ethnic surname; (2) retarded Great-uncle was hidden under the basement stairs when we kids came over to visit Great Grandma; (3) none of us were allowed to meet (another) Great-Uncle Sid & Uncle Pete until the youngest boy cousin turned 14; (4) the greatest shame was The One Divorce in the Family of WWII hero and his 1st wife (of 3) Norma.

Norma. Normal. Traditional.

Two generations later, what is normal-traditional? Even the same first line of ANNA KARENINA can be translated differently. (“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” "All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.") Tolstoy’s premise about happy families warrants skepticism as well; I doubt they’re alike at all. The human family has chimpanzee first cousins. We’re all related through our first land ancestor, the lungfish, straight (?) back to bacteria in some bubbling volcanic pool. Since something like water has just been located on the Moon, who knows, we may have distant relatives there. A more expansive, possibly cosmic, definition of tradition is called for. Are the following the words the ones we want to live by?:

Thus, Nancy Drew suspects, the call for these meditations by The Externalist.

Lois Bassen just won the Atlantic Pacific Press 2009 Drama Prize, and in the past a Mary Roberts Rinehart Fellowship for an alternative history novel, German Sabbath, about the successful assassination of Adolf Hitler on the day after the Night of the Long Knives, June 30, 1934. She has been published in many lit magazines (Kenyon Review, American Scholar, etc.) and online (Minnetonka, Conteonline, The Externalist, etc.). A Vassar grad, she has been married for 42 years, has two adult daughters (a doctor and a teacher), and recently moved from NYC to Rhode Island. She is a prizewinning, produced, and published playwright (Samuel French, MONTH BEFORE THE MOON, NEXT OF KIN at New York's ATA, 2 other plays in OH, NC), and commissioned co-author of a WWII memoir by the young Scottish bride of Baron Hajime Kawasaki (THISTLE & CHRYSANTHEMUM).

Let's talk families with a bite. For years now different people from all over this crazy planet have been stepping out from their "Anne Rice" novels and proclaiming their status as the new age Lestat. Well have any of us thought what of the family members behind them. October is a time of magic, all hallows eve, and lets face it, with a statistical rise in crimes around that time of year, a reason for all those crazies to come out of hiding. Talking to one of my local odd ball families about their lifestyles I was lead into the world of self blood drinking, ritual nightly sleeping in a coffin and a Gothic style of clothing. One thing through this lets call it experience I noticed that yes their untraditional and behind there "walk of the lonely ones" these people pay there bills, go to parent teacher meetings and do the weekly shopping, all these "normal" everyday tasks but with a non-conformed idea of life and how it should look. Although I cant give their names I can honestly say, I was squeamish about blood but I found happy children and loving parents, far from the crime ridden life's of some poor little children and divorce courts. What this world will always see as the "normal" family and the white picket fences, I now see that the old adage is true, you really cant judge a book by its cover.

We no longer think of family the same way we did in the fifties and early sixties. We’re not the Ozzie and Harriet family, nor were we ever. And we’re not The Jeffersons, although that one comes closer. Birth puts us in a pool with those of common genetics, but this doesn’t mean we’re going to like, or even abide, one another. Romance and marriage come closer to creating a true sense of family, but even here I have to quote Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

A couple of years back, I wrote a novel in which a patched-together family, including a widowed woman of middle age, Mattie, who lived with her mother and an elderly man of no relation. And Mattie’s only son was gay. This poor, struggling family counterpointed another, the well-to-do Gaines family who, despite family ties and affluence, dwelled, shall we say, on the dark side of life.

One might say that Mattie’s family came together and stayed out of human necessity, while the Gaines crowd had ample elbowroom to fight among themselves and to engage in nefarious pursuits. While there’s more than a spark of truth to this, it hardly completes the picture.

Today’s social and individual freedom gives us the opportunity to accept conventional ties, but it also allows us to look beyond them. I’ve been married twice, first to a woman with three children, whom I came to love as my own. And they’re still in my life. My second marriage has been one of two childless professionals marrying in middle age. And as I think about it, my personal history, particularly the first marriage, was the inspiration for the novel I mentioned. It was hardly a big seller, but it did strike chords with those who read it. Why? I suspect because my readers either identified with the loving way the oddities of Mattie’s family came together and stayed together. Or, perhaps, they felt the cold chill of kinship with the Gaines gang.

Seen in this light, are today’s so-called non-traditional families a pox on society, a cancerous outgrowth of permissiveness? Hardly. Some familial aggregations of this sort may have come together for the wrong reasons, but all were looking for a way to fulfill the oddities of our personal makeup through some sort of kinship with others. These cobbled-together families may never supplant the traditional, nuclear family, but they will affect it. I suspect that as the more traditional among us seek a deeper sense of permanence in their relationships, they’ll find it buried in the oddities of life, as Mattie’s family did, and perhaps as you and I have done.

Bob Mustin has been a North Carolina Writers Network writer-in-residence at Peace College under Doris Betts' guiding hand. In the early '90s, he was the editor of a small literary journal, The Rural Sophisticate, based in Georgia. His work has appeared in The Rockhurst Review, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Cooweescoowee, Under The Sun, Gihon River Review, Reflections Literary Journal, and at thesquaretable.com, raving dove, Sport Literate, The Externalist, Language and Culture, and R.KV.R.Y in electronic form. Bob's nonfiction appeared in Issue #4 of The Externalist.

Today I added Michael Frissore's fabulous essay "Gay Marriage" to our nonfiction section. Though not technically part of our blog feature, it fit so nicely that I decided to publish it early.

Thoughtful reading,
L.

I live with one man and three cats. Wait—we have many plants here too. I am thinking about winter and the annuals that won’t be returning. My parents, in their 80s, live walking distance from us. My family is present. Family: I’m sinking—but some people, plants, and animals prevent drowning.

Some neighbors may not see us as a family. We can’t get married in Pennsylvania, the keystone state—the key into stone. If we could, we might choose not to get married. Despite legal whims, we will be a family. No judge will call any of our cats to testify. Fair trials aren’t in style when it comes to gay people.

Been told this—families are about procreation. You fuck. A child pops out. A school appears. The kid leaves home. Christmas cards and texting. This is a family? It sounds like a launching pad into a schedule, a do-list. Jack Blanchard and Misty Morgan had a country music hit in 1971 called “There Must Be More To Life (Than Growing Old). Maybe they are right. Family is more to life. But families grow old too. Stan. Three cats. Coneflowers and a passion flower vine.

I am the enemy. Families “have to” be hetero. Like a title that is handed down from a king to a prince. The have to died in a fire. I am. The enemy. But not I am. We are. My family is the enemy. Stan’s nephew said he hates his English class—English is “so gay.” It is. At its best. He sits on a chair on our porch, talks, and never sees us. We are too gay to be seen.

I live with three cats. One man. Did I forget to mention that my responsibility is to change the litter boxes? Did I mention that Stan’s is to update our computers? Un/traditional families. Us? How untraditional can you be when watching George Burns and Gracie Allen is an ideal evening? There must be. More to life. Than growing. Old. Maybe there isn’t more. But along the way, a sweet pat on the head, a meow to get back in from the porch. The allemandan’s yellow illuminating a window. Family. I should mention that we have over 100 blossoms right now on our toad lilies. They advocate for us better than I can.

Ken's poetry appeared in Issue 1. His poem "While the Roofer" is among the best of the work we've published.