A Tree and a Menorah Stand Together

“I like the way this family has reconfigured!” I said to “M,” my new brother-in-law, over Christmas Eve dinner, as I passed a plate of Caramel Gochujang cookies to his lovely Korean wife and their two hungry sons. Two years ago I didn’t know them, let alone the hot Korean spice. Their mixed-race children happily devoured the cookies as I listened with rapt attention to my sister-in-law's stories of how her parents had barely escaped Korea during the war.

My grandchildren were visiting, and I was reading many classic children's books, such as, "Are You My Mommy?" "And Are You My Daddy?" I found myself wanting to write a book called, "Is This My Family?"

Like so many families, our lives changed dramatically due to a DNA test we didn’t even take. It turned out that my husband and “M” were half-brothers. Their mutual father was a sperm donor who made his donation while in medical school. We guess he needed the money. Back then, over 60 years ago, no one imagined that technology would advance to the point where we could trace ancestry as we now can. But it has, and a “bromance” blossomed. Both men had complicated and troubled childhoods, and their relationship is one of the best things they have experienced in their lives.

As a clinical psychologist who works with families, what fascinates me is how the dynamics in the entire family have shifted. It was not a linear progression, and there were other factors, such as divorces, major illnesses, and deaths along the way. However, I feel like I’m now living in a different, more open family. A few shifts can have a profound effect. This is an ancient truth articulated by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, Buddhist psychology, and modern psychological theory, but I’ve never seen it play out this dramatically. As we study in chaos theory, specifically the phenomenon often called the “Butterfly effect,” one small change could be the protagonist of other more dramatic changes.

In seemingly parallel fashion, around the same time, another sister-in-law left a stale marriage and fell in love with someone who was non-binary; with the help of technology, they created a dearly loved child. In spite of initial resistance, as my step-mother-in-law shared with me at a family wedding, “We want our children to be happy, and we do all we can to accept the changes.”

I wish I had known this during my own childhood. As a Jewish child growing up in a predominantly Christian community, my brother and I experienced significant antisemitism and occasional violence. We certainly felt like marginalized outsiders during the holidays. I dreaded them. And I’m sure I unconsciously brought my memories to the Christmas celebrations hosted by my husband’s family.

I got curious and started doing a little research on how families change. There are as yet limited findings on creating “families of choice” in the psychological literature, but I found a wealth of information when I turned to Cultural Anthropology, a field I loved in graduate school. One of my mentors, Robert LeVine, had spent decades studying families all over the world, especially in Africa and Mexico, and distilled this wisdom in his many books. He was also trained as a psychoanalyst and had a deep understanding of child development. And he loved to be provocative; one of his most powerful books was entitled, “Do Parents Matter?” Perusing books and essays by anthropologist and sociologist Claude Levi-Strauss also opened my eyes to a more flexible understanding of kinship. These scholars worked outside American culture and were able to conceptualize different forms of family structure.

I realized that it was time to let go of generations of grudges whose origins no one remembered or wanted to keep going. We now had a new generation of children: two grandsons aged 1 and 4. What if we created new rituals that they could carry on, in a spirit of playfulness and respect? We had a Christmas tree that the kids helped decorate; what if we lit the Menorah as well? Chanukah and Christmas fell on the same day this year; it seemed auspicious. And what if we had latkes (a Jewish delicacy made of fried potatoes) that could accompany our Chinese Five Spice Chicken? Why not start afresh, by not carrying the burdens of the ancestors, as Dick Schwartz, founder of Internal Family Systems (IFS) might suggest. We could create the family we all longed for.

It seemed miraculous that we had all found each other, respected each other, and found joy in each other. What if we could focus on the good?

During months cleaning out my mother’s house—she was 100 when she died and her home was a hoarder’s paradise—we found in the basement an original Scrabble set that dated to 1948. All the original pieces were there, not one letter missing.

We played, we laughed, and we ate the gingerbread house that we had made and decorated together.

It was as good and delicious a metaphor as one could find.