Family life in America at the dawn of the new millennium is immensely more complex than it was in the 1950s. Back then, the nuclear family had emerged as the dominant family form in the nation. It was an unusual historical moment, and it didn’t last long.
Today, family life has gotten back to normal — which is to say, it’s wildly diverse but no less vital to the nation and to the quarter of a billion Americans who now people the landscape.
Families, whatever their form, still struggle to make ends meet, to get along, to balance the needs and desires of individuals with those of the group.
And, no matter their form, families still provide a haven and a home, a place where someone cares.
The five families that follow are examples of the wide variation among American families — and the common threads that all share.
STEPFAMILY
One expert estimates that 39% of all American women and 30% of all children are likely to spend time in a stepfamily.
Building new family ties
Think of the Casciari household in Wilmette as a latter-day Brady Bunch. Mark Casciari, the hubby, has two kids, a girl, Marie, 14, and a boy, Michael, 9. And Joan Casciari, the wife, has three girls: Diana, 17, Caroline, 15, and Stephanie, 10.
But because it’s real life, it’s a bit messier than TV: They’re both divorced. Mark’s ex-wife, with whom he shares custody, lives a few blocks away. Marie and Michael alternate time with both parents.
“It’s exact, like, 6:30 — not 6:31 — that kind of thing,” laughs Marie.
“And sometimes it’s confusing,” says Michael, “because my friends don’t know where I am.”
Joan’s ex has visitation rights he doesn’t exercise very often. “I think the last time I saw him was maybe three years ago,” says Caroline, who shares a room with Marie and enough in common that the family jokes they’re “the unit.”
Lawyers in their 40s who had known each other for nearly 14 years when they began dating, Mark and Joan merged their family almost instantly.
“He’d call and say, `I’m lonely,’ and I’d say, `Well, I can’t leave my kids alone,’ and he’d say, `Bring them over!’ ” remembers Joan about their courtship.
And though it looks pretty easygoing now, family life was difficult–even for “the unit”– when the newly formed stepfamily was established in Mark’s house.
“I liked my room so much in our old house, and here I’d be sharing a room, and it was pink!” Caroline protests.
“And I didn’t want her in my room — I had a sign up that said, `No one is allowed in my room — especially Caroline,’ ” Marie says.
For both parents, their family is still evolving.
“Sometimes,” Mark admits, “I have a harder time relating to her kids.” He tries to solve this by taking each child — his and hers — out alone about once a month for a one-on-one conversation.
`TRADITIONAL’
3 out of every 4 American families with children under 18 are headed by a married couple, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Talking Jared-talk
For Greta Bryson, spending her days with her 14-month-old son Jared is a gift that she treasures, even though she knows it’s only temporary.
“I’m not a die-hard, dyed-in-the-wool, stay-at-home, that’s-the-way-it’s-supposed-to-be mom,” she explains.
In fact, the 33-year-old Bryson, who has a doctorate in biochemistry, returned to work at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro shortly after Jared’s birth last year to finish her post-doctoral research. Then, in the summer, her husband Sidney, 31, whose doctorate is in electrical engineering, was offered a position at Lucent Technologies in Naperville, and the family moved to a large, four-bedroom home in nearby Bolingbrook.
Bryson decided to take her time finding a job since it wasn’t financially necessary to grab the first thing that came along and since it gave her the chance to be with Jared.
Initially, though, things were somewhat bumpy. Jared was used to playing with the children at the day-care home in Greensboro, and Bryson was used to, well, being with adults. Even now, she says, “We have days that are challenging — when he’s being less than his wonderful self.”
But, mostly, mother and son enjoy each other’s company. “We’ve been having fun,” Bryson says. “He talks Jared-talk, and we have wonderful conversations about who knows what.”
Bryson is expecting another child in September, but she plans to return the work force sooner rather than later. Already she is doing some consulting work for the chemistry department at Purdue University, her alma mater, to boost minority enrollment.
Her husband says he likes leaving the diapers and other child-care chores behind when he goes off to work in the morning but adds, “If the roles were reversed, I could definitely get into playing the Mr. Mom role.”
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SINGLE PARENT
More than 9 million American families with children under 18 are headed by a single parent, an increase of nearly 200 percent since 1970, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Going to bed worried
“You go to bed worried,” Debbie Crotty says, “and you wake up worried.”
The life of a single mother isn’t what Crotty expected when she was growing up on Chicago’s Southwest Side. But, in 1988, her 32-year-old husband, John, died suddenly, and she was left to raise their two young sons alone.
“It’s hard enough when you’ve got two people,” Crotty says. “When you’re alone, you don’t know what to do. You feel frustrated, like you’re hitting your head against the wall.”
Crotty, who is now 42, makes do on about $25,000 a year in Social Security and pension payments and in wages from a 10-hour-a-week job running the breakfast program at St. Gall Catholic School in the Gage Park neighborhood.
Her 14-year-old son, Clinton, is an 8th grader at the school, while Jacob, her 10-year-old, is in 4th grade. It was something her husband had wanted for the boys: a Catholic education. But it has made Crotty’s life all the harder trying to provide it, despite occasional financial help from the boys’ grandparents.
“Do you pay the tuition or the insurance? What do you do? You rob Peter to pay Paul,” she says. “If it wasn’t for the grandparents, it would really be hard.”
Part of Crotty’s problem is that she’s trying to make ends meet while fulfilling the traditional role of a mother who gets the boys off to school in the morning and is home in the family’s snug bungalow when they return in the afternoon.
“I can’t work full time. I can’t work weekends. I have nobody to watch my kids,” she says.
Recently, Crotty tried to get free medical insurance from the state for Clinton and Jacob but was told her income was too high. At St. Gall, some officials have told her she should be working full time, she says.
“It’s not that I want a free ride,” she says. “Just a little compassion would be nice.”
ADULT CHILD
Nearly 18 million adult children live with their parents, or 43 percent more than in 1970, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Keeping in touch
Life with her daughter, Lora, is different now for Judy Rigoni. Long gone are the days when Judy would get Lora ready for school, help her with her homework and tuck her into bed.
Lora’s 21 now and a senior at DePaul University. And in the townhome the two share in southwest suburban Palos Hills, she sometimes makes her mother dinner and even helped pick out the wallpaper.
“We’re always in touch with each other,” says Judy, a 46-year-old nurse at Holy Cross Hospital. “Or we’ll leave each other notes in the kitchen so we know where we are and where we’re going and where we can find each other in an emergency.”
In many ways, they’re like roommates. “We can sit and talk, like about politics,” Judy says, “and it’s on a good intellectual basis. She knows what she’s talking about, and her opinions aren’t always the same as mine.”
Judy’s 20-year-old son, Larry, moved into an apartment in Hickory Hills in January, and Judy knows it’s only a matter of time before Lora leaves as well. Lora is planning to marry her boyfriend after she graduates in December, and her fiance has been offered a job near LaCrosse, Wis.
When Judy was starting her family, she and her husband — they divorced five years ago — were living in Blue Island, within walking distance of Judy’s parents and near her five siblings and their families. She and her children and their eventual families won’t be as geographically close.
“I always had help from my family,” she says. “My kids, being that they come from a small family, may have to depend more on friends than I had to.”
But even when they live apart from each other, even hundreds of miles apart, Judy says she and her children won’t stop caring for each other.
“Just because you move away, it doesn’t mean you’re not a family.”
UNMARRIED
According to the one estimate, gay couples account for 1.8 million American households.
A partnership
To hear Arthur Johnston tell it, it’s virtually impossible to pinpoint when he and Pepin Pena, his partner of more than 25 years, joined their lives. “He just kept coming home with me,” Johnston says. “Each night, he’d bring something. The first night, it was records. Then I came home one day and he’d rearranged the furniture.”
It was the beginning of becoming a family — a term with which Johnston and Pena, both 55, still struggle. “Maybe it’s because I’m so used to that Ozzie-and-Harriet mentality of the family as the nuclear family,” Johnston says.
“And this idea that, to be a family, we have to have kids,” Pena says.
Yet it would be hard to argue that Johnston and Pena are anything but: They live together in a splendid Lincoln Park condominium and have dinner together every night, they co-own and operate a business (Sidetrack, one of the city’s most successful and enduring gay clubs, founded in 1983), they share resources and bank accounts, are named as each other’s beneficiary in wills and insurance papers, and actively participate in each other’s family decisions and rituals.
Moreover, they love each other, as spouses and lovers, and they are appreciated in that way within the larger framework of their biological families. How integrated are they? When Johnston’s father died, his mother chose to enter the funeral home on Pena’s arm.
Each year, they travel to Miami for a traditional Cuban Christmas Eve with Pena’s family. “They call him Arturito,” Pena says. “My nieces and nephews, some call him Tio Arturo.” Both Johnston and Pena dish out advice, fly in to help mediate and soothe family trouble and pitch in economically when necessary.
“We feel extremely blessed, so we feel privileged to be able to help,” Johnston says. “See, it’s not like I help my family in Pennsylvania and he helps in Cuba — we do that.”
Would they ever marry, if they could? Pena laughs. “I already feel so married, it’s redundant,” he says.
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