Like Family: Narratives of Fictive Kinship

Like Family

Families in Focus

Series Editors: Naomi R. Gerstel, University of Massachusetts,

Amherst Karen V. Hansen, Brandeis University

Nazli Kibria, Boston University

Margaret K. Nelson, Middlebury College

Katie L. Acosta, Amigas y Amantes: Sexually Nonconforming Latinas Negotiate Family

Riché J. Daniel Barnes, Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Community

Ann V. Bell, Misconception: Social Class and Infertility in America

Amy Brainer, Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan

Mignon Duffy, Amy Armenia, and Clare L. Stacey, eds., Caring on the Clock: The Complexities and Contradictions of Paid Care Work

Estye Fenton, The End of International Adoption? An Unraveling Reproductive Market and the Politics of Healthy Babies

Anita Ilta Garey and Karen V. Hansen, eds., At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild

Heather Jacobson, Labor of Love: Gestational Surrogacy and the Work of Making Babies

Katrina Kimport, Queering Marriage: Challenging Family Formation in the United States

Mary Ann Mason, Nicholas H. Wolfinger, and Marc Goulden, Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower

Jamie L. Mullaney and Janet Hinson Shope, Paid to Party: Working Time and Emotion in Direct Home Sales

Margaret K. Nelson, Like Family: Narratives of Fictive Kinship

Markella B. Rutherford, Adult Supervision Required: Private Freedom and Public Constraints for Parents and Children

Barbara Wells, Daughters and Granddaughters of Farmworkers: Emerging from the Long Shadow of Farm Labor

Like Family

Narratives of Fictive Kinship

MARGARET K. NELSON

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nelson, Margaret K., 1944– author.

Title: Like family : narratives of fictive kinship / Margaret K. Nelson.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2020] | Series: Families in focus | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019025756 | ISBN 9780813564050 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813564067 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813573922 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Families—United States. | Kinship—United States. | Middle class whites—Family relationships—United States.

Classification: LCC HQ536 .N45 2020 | DDC 306.850973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025756

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2020 by Margaret K. Nelson

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Maya Ruth Nelson and Sadie Klein Nelson.

May they have the richness of family, friendship, and fictive kinship throughout their lives.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part I True Life Stories

1 The Texture and Dynamics of Like-Sibling Bonds

2 The Limits of Like-Sibling Bonds

Part II One-Act Plays

3 Guest Teens: Learning Boundaries

4 Host Families: Inclusion and Exclusion

Part III Fairy Tales

5 Unofficial Children: If the Shoe Fits

6 Informal Parents: Promises Broken, Promises Kept

Conclusion: Reconsidering Kinship

Appendix A: Respondents

Appendix B: Studying Fictive Kinship and Informal Adoption

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Accurately or not, I’ve come to think of my natal family as operating like a force field, forcefully embracing the seven members and forcefully rejecting outsiders. Force should not be confused with intimacy; of that there was little. We were a 1950s suburban, White, upper-middle-class family with carefully delineated age and gender roles. And although we had our own quirks, we also structurally resembled most other families in the neighborhood: fathers worked outside the home; mothers stayed home; children went to school and played in the neighborhood; maids cleaned and looked after children. Each evening, after my father came home from his job in the city—and sometimes we picked him up in the (literal) station wagon as he got off the train—he had a drink. Then we ate dinner together. Some of us shared rooms and secrets; we did not share secrets across the generational divide.

Whatever the intimacy or lack of it inside, there was a clear line between who was in and who was out. We all had friendships outside the family, some of them very strong ones. Years later, I can still name most of my four siblings’ best friends. But, aside from a live-in maid for a few years, no one else ever lived with us, and the comings and goings of outsiders were announced and predictable. We asked permission before we invited our friends to stay for dinner. Other children did not come in without ringing a bell or calling beforehand. My parents entertained other couples. I know my mother had close friends and I remember her talking with them on the phone. But neither they—nor the cousins, aunts, and uncles who lived in close proximity—ever simply dropped in. Family was family. Everyone else was a guest.

My four siblings have largely created the same kind of arrangements: all have long marriages and nuclear families with clear boundaries between family and not family. Some of my siblings have had others live with them for brief periods. Most if not all of those guests have been members of the extended family. Two of my siblings invite nuclear and extended family members to regular Sunday night dinners. None of us holds regular, even ritualized, dinners with friends. Years ago, when the parents of one of my son’s friends died, my husband and I spoke to our children about whether we should ask this young boy if he wanted to live with us. When we broached that offer, he refused, saying that he did not know whether he could live in a family that ate dinner together every night. I think he meant that we had our own family force field. He was right. My husband and I had also created a carefully bounded family.

My fascination—one might even say obsession—with the topic of this book stems in part from its novelty to me. I have never had a relationship in which I could walk into someone else’s house without at least a peremptory knock on the door. Although I have been very close to many people outside my family over the course of my life, I never really thought of any of those people as being like family. The members of my natal family have been there for me during moments of casual need and serious distress, as I have been for them. Some have also been both critical of and hurtful to me, as I am sure I have been to them. These dual characteristics have made it unlikely that I would use family as a model for the relationships I create.

There is another aspect to my family’s relationship to outsiders, even more difficult to discuss. When I was an infant, my mother had three children ages four and under, a husband who was in the Navy in the South Pacific, and for a brief period during World War II a full-time job outside the home. She hired a live-in maid, a woman called Martha, a pseudonym I use here but also one my sister Emily and I used when we wrote about her. Martha was African American and the mother of two school-aged children. She moved from her home in Charlottesville, Virginia, to live in Washington, D.C. Some years later, she moved with us to the suburbs of New York. She stayed until I was in second grade. She had her own room and, as I recall, her own mealtimes. I loved her passionately. I do not know what my mother’s relationship to her was, but a year or so after our mother’s death, Emily and I wrote the following:

We were taught from a young age to view this relationship as a form of class and race exploitation. Despite her domestic arrangement, our mother was a leftist. One story illustrates the gulf between her politics and the reality of her life, as well as her desperate, sometimes bizarre attempts to close that gulf. When our mother died, we wrote to Martha. She responded with a long letter in which she reminded us of a time during grade school when one of us had brought home an African American girl who asked our mother whether Martha was our maid. Our mother had answered, No, she’s my cousin.¹

Emily and I also wrote that our family’s reliance on Martha, our own deep attachment to her, and our mother’s discomfort with the contradictions of her life helped to shape [our] research agendas … when we became social scientists. We both separately and together studied caregiving by family members and by hired caregivers.

In my work, I initially largely focused on childcare, dissecting the relationships that develop among providers, children, parents, and providers’ own families. I have also been interested in the enactment of reciprocity, that is, how people carry out obligations to family and friends in similar and different ways. More broadly, I am fascinated with families: I have written about how economic circumstances shape family life and how single mothers do family. I have also, most recently, written about how a sense of family is created through genetic links when children are conceived with donor sperm or donor eggs.

A distinct life-changing event led me to analyze again the border that defines family. In the fall of 2002, when she was fifty-eight years old, Anna Meyers (pseudonym), my friend and colleague of almost thirty years, was diagnosed with what would turn out to be terminal cancer. She had neither partner nor children. She was geographically and emotionally distant from her only siblings (two brothers) and was equally distant on both counts from her elderly parents. After considerable deliberation, she asked Louis (another friend of hers; this name is also a pseudonym) and me if we would take on the responsibility of durable power of attorney for her health care should she become unable to make her own health-care decisions. We both said yes.

For almost two years, our durable power remained an abstraction—a scary, albeit sensible, arrangement to be enacted at some later point. But after Anna fell, broke her hip, and began to fail mentally, Louis and I had to start making critical decisions. Eventually, with input from some of her other friends, we changed her designation at the hospital to comfort care with a do-not-resuscitate order and signed her up for hospice services. A month later, Anna died in her sleep.

For the three months between Anna’s fall and her death, I found it nearly intolerable to have to make these decisions. I did not think that, as a mere friend, I should have such authority. Nothing in my own family life had prepared me for acting as if I were family for someone who was not kin. I tried to analyze my unease in personal essays. I also tried to understand it through more scholarly analyses. Eventually, I decided to write this book. Although it does not answer all my questions or resolve my uneasiness, it has helped me make sense of how other people create relationships that are neither family nor friends, but something else entirely. And writing this book has helped me appreciate the creative generosity of the many people who have given me permission to tell their stories of the unique relationships in their lives.

Like Family

Introduction

Carol Kennedy’s words come out in a rush as she begins to tell me the story of how she met a six-year-old girl from Poland and then, seven years later, permanently welcomed that child into her home.¹ Even through the rush of words, the key points are easy enough to follow. Carol’s husband, Paul, had become good friends with his longtime yoga instructor, a man named Anton. Following a visit back to Poland, Anton brought his daughter (whom he had not seen for four years) home with him to the small New England town where Carol and Paul lived with their three children. Even before fully unpacking, Anton introduced his daughter, Dana, to the Kennedys and their children: a boy who, like Dana, was six years old; another boy who was three years younger; and an infant girl. Carol instantly assumed a mother-like role: I was the person Dana cried with; I was the one that read her stories. Carol also instantly fell in love: How could you not love this beautiful little blonde, straight-haired little girl, with a beautiful smile, who was lost?

In the following years Anton moved among jobs, homes, and relationships. During the difficult times—when he was homeless; when he had no money; when a girlfriend wanted to be with him alone—he usually left Dana with the Kennedys. Sometimes, he left Dana to cope on her own. Eventually, the relationship between the Kennedys and Anton began to fray. Carol and Paul believed Anton had become negligent if not abusive, and they resented being asked repeatedly to feed, comfort, and house Dana only to have her repeatedly yanked from their home. For his part, Anton resented the growing attachment between Carol and Dana, even as he remained dependent on Carol’s goodwill. The tension reached a peak just as Dana was turning thirteen, when Anton’s then-girlfriend would not allow Dana to live in her home. Instead of turning to Carol for a solution as he often had in the past, Anton decided to send his daughter to his family in Toronto; these were people Dana had never met, and all of them only spoke Polish. This time Carol fought back and won a court order granting her temporary legal guardianship. Carol was overjoyed. And Dana, Carol tells me, was overjoyed too. The day Carol picked Dana up for good, Carol says, [Dana] jumped into my arms screeching at the top of her lungs, ‘My dreams came true, my prayers have been answered, my dreams came true, I can live with you.’

In our first interview, Carol remembers that after she had won guardianship she worried more about how they could fit Dana into their house than how they could fit her into their family. The house, which originally had two bedrooms, had already been reconfigured (but not enlarged) to accommodate the couple’s third child, who had been born after Carol and Paul had assumed they were finished having children. Now the house had to be reconfigured again. This time Paul and Carol moved into the basement and finished off the attic, so each of the now four children could have a separate, albeit tiny, room of his or her own. But money was as tight as housing. The two incomes from Paul’s job as a physical therapist and Carol’s as a teacher had been strained almost to the breaking point to support the three children the couple already had; now those incomes had to be stretched still further. Hard as that stretching might have been, Carol insisted that Dana would have the same as Carol’s own children: If my kids had nice winter jackets, then she wasn’t going to get a Walmart jacket. She deserved the same thing every other child in my house deserved.

In retrospect, Carol believes she probably should have been as attentive to the emotional needs of her husband and Joey, her oldest son, as she was to Dana’s material needs. Indeed, although Carol had bonded with Dana from the start, and the two younger children adapted easily to this addition, both Paul and Joey, each in his own way, struggled to accommodate to these new arrangements. Twelve years after Dana came to live with the Kennedys, Carol tells me that some tension remained and that the existing relationships were not as close as she would have liked them to be. She also tells me that two times during Dana’s teenage years, when she and Dana had major conflicts, she had threatened to make Dana leave. Three years after that first interview, when we speak again, Carol openly acknowledges difficulties: Dana has had a huge impact on our family across time. But she also rejoices: She’s now given us a granddaughter who’s lovely.

Carol’s comments point to inconsistencies in her understanding of just who Dana is to herself, her husband, and her children. Carol says that she, along with Paul and their three children, have a family in which Dana may not be a full member but on which Dana has had a huge impact. Still, Carol insists that she treated Dana much as she did each of her original three children, and she celebrates Dana’s baby as her grandchild.

I had known about this particular set of relationships for years—the Kennedys were close friends of a colleague—before I started in earnest to conduct my research on a broad variety of intimate, non-kin relationships among people very much like the Kennedys. My initial interests were these: to explore the motivations for, and dynamics of, these non-kin relationships; to understand the manner in which people like the Kennedys differentiated between family members and people who were like—but not quite fully—family; and, finally, to learn how that differentiation might inform an understanding of kin relations within today’s White middle-class.

Going Down the Wrong Paths

My interests led me first to the scholarship that investigates the creation of new family forms and then to a massive body of scholarship referring to the concept of fictive kinship.² Neither examines in depth the precise phenomena in which I was interested. The focus of the first always turns out to be innovative relationships of people other than straight, middle-class Whites. Scholars looking at these new arrangements have told us (actually some decades ago) that gays and lesbians create families of choice, especially when their own families of birth reject them.³ Scholars also frequently report that people of color, immigrants, and poor folk depend both on the members of their extended family and on what is known as fictive kin.⁴ Lately, research shows that older people find themselves needing to rely on communities of support that include both paid caregivers who feel like family and their own sets of fictive kin.⁵ People living alone and people living in polyamorous families—defined as those with adults in openly conducted multiple-partner relationships—are also appearing more frequently in the literature.⁶ But when scholars publishing in our major journals study straight, middle-class Whites, they usually portray them as living in strictly bounded nuclear families. Scholars then report on how those families struggle to solve the problems their family form creates: obtaining sufficient resources, finding a work-life balance, helping children with homework, deciding just who is going to do the darn housework, and dealing with the sequelae of separation and divorce.⁷

The research on fictive kinship also initially proved to be a dead end. Precise definitions of the concept vary; most are similar to the one Carol Stack uses in her widely cited 1974 book, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community, in which she explains that she is referring to non-kin who … conduct their social relations within the idiom of kinship.⁸ However, most of the discussions of the concept are very brief: they tell us that people sometimes rely on fictive kin for social support; they also often describe the conditions leading people to do so. But, except for Stack, these studies barely scratch the surface of the phenomenon and offer next to nothing about the texture of the ensuing relationships. Moreover, almost all of these studies assert that fictive kinship is a custom particularly common among people of color but rarely found within the White population.⁹

There is something odd here. Marginal peoples—as defined by such variables as race/ethnicity, income, immigration/citizenship status, age, sexual orientation—are depicted as being creative enough to mix up their relationships so as to ensure that their needs are met in configurations of affiliation that extend well beyond the membership of a traditional nuclear or extended family. Conversely, these same marginal peoples are depicted as being generous enough to meet the needs of the members of their broadly defined communities. Straight White folk, by comparison, are depicted as being both unimaginative and stingy.¹⁰

Evidence of Fictive Kinship among Whites

Once I chose to challenge this characterization of middle-class Whites, I was surprised to find among precisely that group of people compelling evidence of novel arrangements that could fit under the umbrella of fictive kinship. First, I came across a study conducted in 2010 by Dawn Braithwaite and her colleagues, who asked students, faculty, and staff of three universities (two in the Midwest, one in the West) whether they had relationships with those people who you perceive and treat as extended family, yet are not related to you by blood or legal ties. It turned out that (through students in communication courses, postings on departmental and campus listservs, and personal and professional contacts) the researchers easily located 110 respondents who self-identified as having this kind of relationship; it also turned out that the vast majority of their respondents (88.1 percent) were Caucasian/Anglo.¹¹

Second, Robert J. Taylor and his colleagues asked 6,082 respondents in a nationally representative sample (which included 3,570 African Americans, 891 non-Hispanic Whites, and 1,621 Blacks of Caribbean descent) the question, How many people are close to your family who are not really blood related or marriage related but who are treated just like a relative?¹² A reanalysis of these data revealed that the proportion of people who reported having fictive kin was high in each of three separate racial/ethnic groups: 91 percent of Blacks of Caribbean descent, 90 percent of African Americans, and 83 percent of Whites said that they had these relationships.¹³

These two sets of data make it abundantly clear that something like fictive kinship is a common phenomenon in US society among Whites as well as among those groups to whom it is more commonly attributed. Indeed, the studies tell us that sometimes White people intentionally develop meaningful relationships with people who are not family or kin and that they then consider these other people to be of enough importance that they think of them as being like family.

In this book I build on these findings. I focus on White, essentially middle-class people, most of whom self-define as straight, because these are the people most studies of fictive kinship ignore.¹⁴ In the remaining portions of this introduction, I cover five issues that had to be resolved in order to conduct my research. I show how I settled methodological problems of finding respondents and conducting interviews. I then turn to conceptual issues and discuss how I narrowed my definition of fictive kinship and developed a typology of the kinds of fictive kinship I explore. In the next section, I identify my specific research questions. In the last two sections, I explain how I chose to handle ongoing language issues and how I differentiate the practice of fictive kinship from other practices to which it might be compared.

Settling Methodological Issues

Finding Respondents within a Narrow Population

In collecting my data, I was not trying to assess frequency of representation of fictive kinship among Whites. Rather, I chose to use a sample of convenience, designed to understand the characteristics of family-like relationships among those typically left out of studies of this topic. And I had no problem finding respondents.¹⁵ Eagerly, my overlapping circles of family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances told me stories: I know someone who has hosted over a dozen foreign students at the local college; I know someone who always had at least one extra teenager living with them; I know someone who was partly raised by people to whom he was unrelated; I know someone who is making all the health-care decisions for, and providing daily care to, an elderly woman who is not a relative. To supplement these stories, I also simply posted on an electronic bulletin board in the small New England college town where I live, asking for the accounts of these non-kin relationships.¹⁶ Because friendship circles and neighborhoods are so segregated in terms of class and race, it is not surprising that I was led to people who were White and, at some level, either middle-class or well on the way to being so through attendance at an elite four-year college or university.

To round out my sample I traveled around the country—interviewing from the East Coast through the Midwest to the West Coast and from New England down to the Washington, DC, area. I tracked down stories that sounded particularly interesting and, sometimes, when I had started with only one side’s account of a relationship, I also obtained the other. Altogether, I conducted in-depth, face-to-face interviews with seventy-five different people (sixty-one women; fourteen men) in sixty-eight different households. (I conducted seven interviews with the two members of a married couple at the same time.)¹⁷

My respondents ranged in age from their early twenties to their late eighties.¹⁸ Sixty percent of the respondents were married; most of those who were married had children of their own through birth or adoption, as did some of those who were not married. As a group, my respondents were well educated: 9 percent were students in a four-year college when I interviewed them (several but not all of these were at the college where I taught); 1 percent had an AA degree, 29 percent had BAs, 33 percent had MAs, and the remaining 27 percent had professional degrees (including thirteen PhDs, five law degrees, one medical degree, and one divinity degree).¹⁹

Conducting Interviews

I started each interview by asking my respondents to tell me the story of their relationship with a particular individual to whom they were not related by blood or marriage but whom they considered to be like a member of their family. I probed for information about such issues as how the respondent met that person, how the relationship changed over time, how family and friends reacted to this relationship and how the respondent felt about that person in relation to how the respondent felt about members of his or her nuclear and extended families. I also asked how respondents made decisions about the degree to which they might be involved in the lives of their fictive kin. As snippets of interviews will show, I pushed for answers to difficult questions and, on more than one occasion, irritated a respondent who did not like the framing of a particular question or, indeed, the question itself. I also gathered background information about education, marital status, number and ages of children, and occupation. The interviews generally ran at least an hour; several ran for several hours; and I interviewed each of three people on two separate occasions. Most often, I traveled to the home of my respondents; some preferred to meet in my home; and some chose to meet in a neutral space such as a café.

Conceptual Issues

Broad Definitions

In the existing studies—and in mine—the operationalization of the concept of fictive kin is subjective (relying on the respondent’s language usage, perceptions, and treatment). People who are considered fictive kin by one individual might not be so considered by another. These operationalizations are thus both potentially overinclusive and potentially overexclusive. They all also rely on the language of, and an analogy to, family to make their meaning clear. This is the case because these operationalizations refer first to the family, albeit in a negative way (e.g., not related by blood or marriage), and because each relies on an implicit understanding of how it is that family members act (e.g., consider to be like a member of the family). The operationalizations thus imply that everyone knows how kinship or family is enacted—and how people in those relationships treat one another—although many scholars write (and many write a great deal) about the variability among families in both enactment and treatment.

To be sure, we do not need to go back to Tolstoy for a reminder that families (maybe especially, but certainly not exclusively, unhappy ones) differ on just about any dimension we would choose to describe them. How we do family depends on the normative expectations for our particular social group as defined by such variables as class, race/ethnicity, religion, community, region of the country, and sexual orientation. We also engage in the imaginative and creative construction of these relationships through interaction. The sociologist Graham Allan writes that the construction of family life is intrinsically both institutional and interactional.²⁰ Allan also identifies some norms—kind of reciprocity, sense of commitment and obligation, legal privileging, flow of money, and symbolism of blood—that he thinks mark family as being a unique relationship.²¹ His list mixes the institutional (e.g., legal privileging) with the interactional (e.g., sense of commitment). His list also might tell us more about how we believe family members should act toward one another than about how family members actually behave. In fact, even if we limit our sights to the White, middle-class family (as I will for the most part here), we are always going to find great variation in how people believe they