Good Families Are No Accident

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

My younger brother, divorced and with a grown son, called me a couple of years ago. “I’d like to take you up on your offer,” he said. I knew immediately what he meant. Long ago I had told him that if he ever got lonely, he was welcome to come and live with us. He admitted that since he’d retired, it was pretty quiet at his house, so he now has a bedroom downstairs outfitted with a big screen TV, a bunch of high-tech computer stuff, and a quality bed he brought with him (correctly assuming that any bed we might provide had probably seen its better days 10 years past).

He’s been easy to live with, partly because we grew up in the same house, so we learned the same patterns of behavior from the same set of parents. In theory that means that we’d have similarities of personality, interests, and skills. Nope. He’s considerably brighter than I am, was a serious jock—even played college basketball–, loves fishing and golf (both skills which elude me), and is often on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Plus, he’s several inches taller than me and, on top of that, better looking! (Which seems unfair in the vast eternal scheme of things!)

The other night at the dinner table, Daughter #1 was delivering salad and dessert to a family nearby who had suffered the loss of a beloved family member. When my brother offered to go with her and keep the cake from arriving upside down on the floor of the backseat, she said, “Thanks, I can handle it,” and walked out the door. He turned to me. We nodded in unison, and he pronounced, “She’s definitely Marba Rose’s granddaughter.” Exactly. That’s just what our mother would have said in the same situation. We laughed out loud at the invisible pull of my mother’s influence still pervasive though she has been lunching on the veranda of Heaven for almost 20 years.

I’ve been thinking lately about how every family builds patterns which, more often than not, guide our daily behaviors in ways we occasionally understand but to which we are most often oblivious. As a teacher I used to claim that I could tell which kids on my newspaper staff had had parents who volunteered with the local church congregation or worked in the PTA. How? In the early days when the school newspaper had to be literally cut and pasted together, those were the kids who cleaned up their own messes. Without nagging reminders.

When people ask me how my children are doing, I often reply that they are all “employed”—a work ethic which I hope they learned from their dad and I–and if not from us, certainly from their grandparents and the generations who came before them. It can be pretty difficult (and sometimes downright self-defeating) to buck the traditions and behaviors we learn at home.

Case in point: Son #4. As a child he hated eating anything “green”. He gagged on virtually every vegetable except corn and secretly brushed his uneaten portions in the trash behind my back, refusing to try anything that looked suspiciously like it might be remotely wholesome. (And advocate of Robert Kirby’s philosophy, he claimed that “greens are what food eats!”) But now that he has kids, I see him swallowing broccoli, lettuce, and peas with a smile (or maybe it’s just a slightly twisted grimace?). Why? Because his wife insists their children learn to eat healthy meals. She has provided them—so he feels the weight of his responsibility to model that behavior for the upcoming generation. (A fact that is enormously entertaining to his siblings who remember the tantrums of his youth at the dinner table.)

Patterns matter whether we are aware of them or not. For example, the family Daughter #1 provided salad and dessert for a couple of evenings ago? One of my sweetest memories is that same husband and wife with all five of their children, the youngest only about four, showing up at my door a couple of days after Son #2 passed away. They brought us a large pot of still simmering soup which fed more than a dozen of the relatives who had come from out of town for the funeral. And the family didn’t just drop  off the meal,  they joined my own family in our living room, speaking gentle consolation for the depth of our family’s loss. In the process they demonstrated their extraordinary compassion, a priceless pattern of empathy and concern for their own children. And for mine.

Of course, some children rebel against the traditions of the generations before them, but the memorable adage in Proverbs 22:6 which enjoins, “raise up a child in the way he should go: And when he is old, he will not depart from it,” seems to have hit upon an enduring truth. Our default behaviors  tend to be the patterns which we learned at home. Good families are no accident.