306. Your Family Is Normal

Grab a broom because we’re making a big, sweeping generalization! Your family is normal!

If you want to celebrate or learn about other “normal” families, listen to the new Feelings and Co show, Reformulating.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

NORA: I’m Nora McInerny and it’s going to be okay.

I am going to grab a broom right now because I’m about to make some SWEEEEEPING generalizations. Or at least one: your family is normal.

I don’t know your family. I don’t know you, unless I do know you in real life, which is irrelevant because the sweeping generalization applies, sweepingly, to everyone.

Even you.

I grew up in a Catholic household in South Minneapolis with a mom and a dad and three siblings and a few random pets here and there. I went to a Catholic school where most of the families more or less looked like mine, and I assumed that I’d grow up and marry a man and have four kids.

And from the outside, it looks like I did it!

I have a husband. We have four kids.

But he’s my second husband and I’m his second wife.

When we met, I was a widowed mom of one and he was a divorced dad of two. We got pregnant, had a baby, got married eventually.

We blended a family, and that takes some explaining when we meet new people. And at the beginning, it felt kind of weird or bad explaining it. Like I had to defend it or justify it which has nothing to do with anyone else and everything to do with my own expectations and projections.

I thought, oh man, this is kind of weird, right?

WRONG! For the first time in my entire life, I was wrong.

DUH.

Families all look different, if you really look. They all feel different. Tolstoy said that all happy families are alike but with respect to a venerated Russian author, I don’t even think that’s right! Every family is different, and every family is also the same because every family, even yours, is normal.

A Pew Research study in 2015 found that there is no longer a dominant family structure in the US. That dominant family structure I imagined? It’s not the dominant structure anymore.

And even if it was? Who cares! Just because something is dominant doesn’t make it BETTER. Family is not a rulebook. Family is not a prison sentence. Family is not easily defined.

And when I asked people about their families, and how they’re different than they imagined, I got so many responses. Messages from two widows who found each other and fell in love and got married. Messages from people who married their grade school sweetheart, who never married at all because you don’t have to get married! It’s optional! What everyone who emailed me said was that their family is not what they expected it to be. Some of them love it just the same, and some have learned to live with the pain of what never was.

Family has always been defined by the people within it. Families have always changed, and changed us.

My friend Julia Winston made up a brand new word to reflect this: refamulating.

It’s a verb. A process of honoring the changes in your family, and in yourself. And it’s happening all around us, all the time. A baby is born and a family grows. Someone dies and a family shrinks. Marriage and divorce and remarriage…partnership outside of marriage! It’s all family, it all counts.

Your family is normal because there are no normal families, and because all families are normal.

MUSIC

If you haven’t listened yet, we have a new podcast by producer Claire McInerny and Julia Winston called Refamulating, about the many ways we make a family. It’s real stories of people who are defining and redefining family, and it’s beautiful and life-affirming. We’ll link to it in our show description, but you can also find it anywhere you are listening to this podcast.

IGTBO is an independent podcast and we appreciate you being here with us.

We’re a production of feelings & co, the only place to find feelings. Besides in your heart and many other places.

Our team is Claire McInerny, who produced this episode, Marcel Malekebu and Grace Barry. This episode was mixed by Amanda Romani and our theme music is by Secret Audio.