Family UnTied
Remote Photography by Dave Cooper
Story by Jen Cooper
In the 1930s and 40s, during a raging world war, Norman Rockwell was tasked with creating cover art for The Saturday Evening Post.
It was the largest publication in circulation and had power to influence millions. Rockwell knew this, saying, “If you did a cover for The Post you had arrived. . . . Two million subscribers and then their wives, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, friends. Wow! All looking at my cover.”
The sexism in his comment aside, he was correct—the impact was massive. Cover images served to soothe and calm an anxious public worried about the war and to reinforce the belief that what they had was worth fighting for, which it was.
So Rockwell and The Post essentially created a campaign. Rockwell depicted scenes of carefree children playing, families gathered around the dinner table, and parents cutting into birthday cake. These were the types of scenes that The Post and Rockwell felt evoked the American Dream. Happy families were at the center of the American world.
At least, that was what The Post was selling. And who could blame them? It was a wistful dream then. And it’s what so many of us grew up being told. But was that ever the reality or was it mere propaganda?
It’s hard to say. All I can say is that today, in this era, the divide between Americans rivals the times of the Civil War, when families chose opposite sides in the fight.
In my own family tree, this rift was felt. My great-great-great uncle left the North to fight for the Confederacy. As he packed up his meager belongings and headed out the door his family said, “Don’t come back unless you’re dead.”
And he didn’t come back alive.
Today, countless Americans are having these same fights. Okay, maybe not as intensely as my ancestors, but the rifts, the shunnings, the blocked family members on social media, they’re all there.
Generations were sold The Saturday Evening Post image, and yet it left so much—and so many—out of the frame. It should be noted that while Rockwell did paint The Problem We All Live With, showing a young Ruby Bridges being escorted to school by U.S. Marshals while tomatoes were thrown at her, along with Southern Justice and The New Neighbors, which also dealt with America’s problem with race, those works were created on his own time. The Post did not want children or families of color on their covers.
So I guess what I’m saying is this: If you find yourself trying to hold your world together as it breaks apart at the seams, or in other words, challenges the Post-Rockwellian image, you are not alone.
I spoke with six women who are navigating the divide between parent and child, friends, and relatives. It’s emotional, it’s raw, and it’s a story written as it was lived.
Many of the names have been changed to prevent further harm to families already in pain.
I should also acknowledge that these stories are told from one side, as most stories are.
“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds, they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material. ”
“Well, it kind of came out of nowhere,” says Allison. “My mom called about cucumbers. Asked me if I had any recipes.”
Allison was in the process of rebuilding a relationship with her mom, which had been tenuous since her childhood. But after her grandmother died last year, she felt pulled to reconnect. “I’ve been trying to reach out to her since then.”
They kept the conversations light. Topics like recipes and gardening were their point of connection. But as all relationships deepen, so do the conversations. And that is where things got challenging.
“And then somehow, during this talk about cucumbers we ended up talking about Black people. My mom said, ‘I’m just so tired of it being in the news. Slavery is over.’”
Allison, who is white and married to a man of color and raising a child of mixed ethnicity, felt a jolt. “I got really ragey and yelled. By the end of the call, she tried to change the conversation back to cucumbers, but I wasn’t ready. She said, ‘I’m just this way! This is how I am!’ And then, she hung up on me.”
Allison could have let it go, but didn’t. “All the messaging I’m getting from the Black community is that my mom is my problem. So I thought about it and thought it’d be an opportunity to move the needle. I did research to gather some talking points from experts like Rayshawn Ray and I called her and left her a message. I said, ‘If you want to know why it’s more than slavery, give me a call.’”
And what happened next was surprising. Allison’s mom did call back and said, “Okay, what do you want to teach me?”
I wondered how Allison got to this point. I mean, of course advancing the conversation is what we all should do, but what we should do sometimes becomes an unbearable challenge. Especially when we’re faced with rejection from the very ones we’ve been taught are supposed to love us no matter what.
That kind of rejection is felt on a soul level.
“It’s actually not super hard with her because we haven’t really had a relationship. It’s harder with my dad because he isn’t speaking to me, really. We talk on holidays and birthdays. But basically, a couple years ago after Charlottesville, he said it wasn’t fun to talk to me anymore.”
“He told you that?” I asked.
“He told me that.”
For weeks as I’ve sat with this story I thought about what each of us are willing to lose in the revolution. And for Allison’s dad and other parents, it seems they’re willing to lose any meaningful relationship with their children.
“He said both sides were at fault in Charlottesville. But then he blamed antifa and anti-Trump supporters for everything. I realized after all this that his comfort is the most important thing to him. If it makes him uncomfortable he won’t talk about it.”
There was a pause before Allison continued. “I make him feel very uncomfortable right now and that feels really crappy.”
“The opposite of loneliness is not togetherness. It’s intimacy.”
Amy grew up in a conservative part of her state. “It wasn’t unusual to see a confederate flag,” she remarks, “but there wasn’t a lot of the same level of tension as today. Growing up, we all heard each other out.”
But it’s not Amy’s parents that she has a challenging relationship with. Her mother, in a more than 30-year-long beam of maternal pride, even keeps a copy of the poem about MLK Amy wrote when she was a little girl. Amy wrote it in purple crayon after watching a documentary on King.
For Amy, it’s her in-laws. “Since COVID, my father-in-law spends all day listening to talk radio and FOX. He believes COVID is a conspiracy and he won’t wear a mask outside. We’re all trying frantically to keep him safe.”
Amy said the separation really started back in 2016. That’s when their political differences were made more apparent.
I asked if they’ve ever gotten into an argument about it. Amy said the tension was less fiery, explaining, “My father-in-law’s seen my Obama bumper sticker so he knows what my values are, but we’ve never faced it head on. He’ll make a sarcastic remark, but we’ve never gotten to the point where we’ve had to debate a particular subject.”
But that type of tension, the quiet kind, the polite kind, can be just as damaging. “There’s this intense non-confrontational thing in my husband’s family. So it’s become a really unfortunate dance of constantly having our guard up. We can’t open ourselves up too much to them.”
And without opening ourselves up, how can we connect? How can we be there for each other?
It’s not only emotional distance between them. The comments have created physical distance between them as well. “We don’t get together with them nearly as much as we used to. I don’t want my daughter to hear a comment and absorb any of it. And we know if we weren’t standing right there, he’d make a comment.”
Amy admits that everything she’s thinking about them, they’re thinking about her. Yet she still can’t wrap her mind around the way they see the world. “Why would you ever choose politics or systems over people?”
For some, this is the divide they cannot cross and I can’t help but think about the pain exposed in it. “There are a lot of families that are closer and see each other more, make meals when they’re sick, watch the kids. We don’t have that, and I feel actual heartache.”
“I can’t say it’s not painful being estranged from most of my family. I wish it could be otherwise. ”
“When people meet me, they assume I’m straight,” says Cassie. “It’s my choice if I tell them and I know if I do, there’s a 50/50 chance they’re going to hate me.”
Cassie grew up in a tiny conservative town raised by a super-Catholic family. “The whole time I was growing up, I didn’t learn that being gay was just wrong. It was, you’re going to burn in hell.”
The shame inflicted on Cassie from the community and her family was so strong that she didn’t come out until her son was six years old. At that point, Cassie says, “I was forced to have the hard conversation that I had avoided for 25 years.”
“My Grandpa told me what the Bible says, ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin.’ I told him, ‘Think about it this way: I think that because you’re married to Grandma you’re going to burn in hell, but I still want to be your friend.’”
The fallout was intense. “Almost everyone in my family abandoned me,” Cassie says.
But Cassie, who has a Black partner, realizes there’s another layer that her partner has to deal with that Cassie doesn’t: race. “When you’re Black, you’re walking around racists everyday. You don’t know who to trust.”
And that feeling of not knowing who to trust would put a chasm between anyone, even family. Cassie and her partner are often unsure whether her family’s words and actions are motivated by racism or homophobia.
But that hasn’t discouraged Cassie from having difficult conversations. Even though she admits it’s easy to scream at the strangers waving Trump flags and the idiot from high school who shares FOX News clips on Facebook, nothing you say will change their minds. To make a real impact Cassie says, you have to do the harder thing. You have to have a conversation with your 70-year-old grandma who is quietly racist. As Cassie notes, “She’s just as dangerous to people of color and the LGBT community as the man waving a confederate flag.”
And while it might be hard to chat with elders about their ways of seeing the world, Cassie reminds us that by not having those conversations, we’re doing three things that do harm: first, we’re making them feel safe with their racist beliefs; second, we’re silencing ourselves from speaking out when things are wrong; and third, we’re destroying our ability to have an actual relationship with that person.
About that last point, Cassie says that while coming out destroyed a lot of relationships she valued, it also showed her that some people cared about her more than she ever knew. “It made it easier to weed out the people who wouldn’t support me and left me with a network of people who love me unconditionally as I am.”
But building that network does come at a price. “People really love seeing gay couples raising a family or having a happy life,” Cassie says, “but oftentimes they don’t know what it took to get there or the trauma it takes to get there.”
“The one who cares enough to remove the splinter will always be blamed for the pain. Be a healer anyway. ”
Sometimes it’s not our family who’s the problem, but the people who we thought were our friends.
Mary won’t speak Arabic in public with her parents when they visit her here in the U.S. She’s afraid someone might stop them. And who can blame her? As Mary says, “The way they paint Arabs on TV and in movies is as a bunch of terrorists. That’s propaganda against my people.”
She came to the U.S. not knowing a ton about its history, but did know its personality. Frankly, our personality is one of our biggest exports.
She’d learned from experiencing U.S. involvement in her home country, and heard stories from her husband, a U.S. citizen whose mother is Arab. “He grew up hearing people tell his mother to “Go back where you came from!” They thought she was Hispanic.”
Mary also knew that many Americans viewed Arabs as sub-human. But over the years, she’d made friends with her American neighbors. Most told her they’d forgotten she was Lebanese altogether.
So it was almost surprising one day when she wrote a social media post celebrating the rich history of Lebanon, that she was confronted with just how fragile her friendships were.
The immediate response was defensiveness. Friends were upset that Mary didn’t celebrate the U.S. like she did Lebanon in her post. She thought she was just celebrating her home country, where her family still lived—and Mary missed both the country and her family terribly.
That’s when Mary noticed that “Some people can’t handle when you challenge or confront their history.”
I asked Mary what happened next. She said that they quietly severed their friendship. But ghosting, when emotions are repressed and there’s no hope of closure, can hurt most of all. “Time usually heals wounds for me,” Mary explained, “but I have become more guarded and less trusting. It’s that feeling of never feeling like I belong here; like I’m an outsider always looking in.”
“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.”
There is a great political divide in Jayme’s family. She explains, “My family is as far right-wing as you can get, and I’m about as far left as you can get.” And as politics and religion go hand in hand these days, regardless of the American ideal that separates church and state, there’s a religious divide as well. Jayme characterizes her family as extreme non-denominational born-again Christian. She is not.
But the tension, as it does in most families, goes back ages. And it’s not really about politics or religion. In fact, while those differences are what we’re fighting over today, the real battle is over something that runs far deeper.
“My mom had me when she was 16. Her parents made her confess to their whole congregation in order to stay in the church.” When Jayme also got pregnant at 16 she says her mom and stepfather didn’t make her confess. “They basically threw me out on the lawn. I lived in a homeless shelter for a year as I finished high school.”
Jayme graduated and moved on to college. She attended an all-girl’s school and said there was a lot of love and support around being a single mom. She even brought her son to class. But, because humans are hardwired for interdependence, she still needed help. So Jayme went to her grandparents, the same ones who had her mother confess, and asked if she could live with them if she paid rent. They agreed.
As Jayme grew into her passion for social justice, things became more awkward between them.
“I adore my grandparents because they raised me and took me in at my darkest hour,” Jayme says, “but it’s always conditional. Now with politics, I feel we are really becoming estranged. I had to mute them on social media. It was so hurtful. Saying things about removing statues and how they won’t kneel for anyone but God.”
Jayme was caught, like many right now, in the emotional confusion between the love they have for their family, and that love meaning they know their family deserves better. “I expect more out of them. I want them to be better. I know they can be, but they refuse. It’s like a willful ignorance.”
And Jayme isn’t alone. Some researchers suggest that up to 40% of Americans have experienced some kind of family estrangement (source). And the most likely cause of estrangement? A mismatch of values. In fact, researchers found that violations of a parent’s values are more likely to cause estrangement than if the child committed a crime (source). So what happens when long-held values such as white supremacy are challenged? Families fall apart.
It was George Floyd’s murder that motivated Jayme to bring her activism home. “It’s gotten to a point where I feel I have to say something. I definitely gave them a pass for a long time, not just because of my loyalty, but because I do feel there needs to be a little grace around the generation that was raised that way.”
It’s that grace that makes Jayme aware her family isn’t going to embrace everything she stands for. “I don’t expect anyone in my family to have my values or views, but I want there to be an awareness of their own parts in the oppression of others. I want there to be a little accountability. Acknowledgment and move on. I mean, I’m not expecting them to protest in the streets like me, but a little step towards progress would be good.”
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Family UnTied: Follow Up
We spoke with six women whose family relationships shattered at the height of a brutal election season and a summer of reckoning. We followed up with three of them to see what, if anything, has changed since then. Were they able to reconcile?
[con’t…]
Somewhere as a kid, I heard that blood was thicker than water. Meaning, family was the most important bond there was. I don’t know where exactly I picked it up. Church? A playground? Some shows on TV like Dallas or Dynasty? Or maybe a movie like The Godfather? Or maybe it was merely an echo from the Norman Rockwell days.
Wherever it came from, it felt like a magical saying, never to be broken. But I had zero awareness of how dysfunction or codependency played into it all. I also had no awareness that family could be what you made it.
But as Jayme told me, “Surrounding yourself with people who share the same values as you is just as important as your blood ties.”
I asked Jayme how she was dealing with the estrangement. She said, “I have this amazing little family of Resistor Sisters and we march together and go to the offices of our representatives together. They are more supportive of me and my kids than my own family.”
And while she says, “Your family is what you make it,” she also cautions against cutting off ties with relatives completely. “I don’t think severing a relationship is necessary. You can talk. I don’t think there’s hope if you don’t talk.”
“A family is a risky venture, because the greater the love, the greater the loss… That’s the trade-off. But I’ll take it all.”
Cutting off family isn’t an option for Lauren. While her stepmom believes Bill Gates is behind COVID and reminds anyone who brings up Black Lives Matter that white people were slaves too, Lauren isn’t willing to let go of the relationship. “I love her so deeply and she’s my only connection to my childhood. When I don’t have her anymore, I have no one who knew me as a kid.”
Legacies and history—however messy or complicated our origin stories are—are our foundation. We grow from them. To have them collapse isn’t just disorienting; it throws us into a spiral, forcing us to confront everything we thought we knew about ourselves and everything we were conditioned to believe.
“My stepmom has gotten so vocal about her opinions since Trump got into office. Every conversation now starts with her crying over the direction of the country, and how she’s never seen the country so angry and says, ‘And I even lived through the MLK stuff.’”
But even though Lauren hated her stepmom’s views, she hated confrontation more. And this dynamic played out in advantageous ways for both of them. “My stepmom would always give me an out and so I’d play along and say I was too busy to discuss things.”
Eventually though, the comfort gained by that arrangement became untenable. Lauren knew she needed to address it, which led her to an uncomfortable discovery. “Part of why I didn’t want to be confrontational with her was that I didn’t trust my own opinions. I know I don’t have to go deep and defend myself with my friends, because I live in an echo chamber.”
This realization was a breakthrough moment which led to even more revelations.
First, she realized her stepmom lived in an echo chamber as well. “What I’ve learned is that the few times I’ve pushed back and asked her to defend her opinions, she got very flustered. I had built her up because she had such strong opinions that I assumed it was based in fact, but it’s conspiracy theory shit. It’s dark web reading.”
Then she recognized they were both driven by the same thing: fear. “I noticed when I pushed a little bit, she was just going on her gut, too. She’s passing it off as fact, but it’s based on emotions and fear, which is a lot of what mine is, but we’re on opposite sides of it.”
Finally, she discovered a way to listen. She started asking questions and avoided getting defensive. And that’s when Lauren understood something she hadn’t before. “There’s not much to be said. She just wants to be heard.”
Lauren and her stepmom are still deep in grief after mourning the loss of Lauren’s father. They need each other, especially now when everything feels so tenuous. “We’re the only thing we have left. I need this relationship, so cutting her off isn’t an option, but I also have to figure out how to set some boundaries. I need this relationship to continue because she’s where I get mothering and emotional support.”
I think about Lauren’s understanding of grief and what we need to make it through the pain.
Grief is a powerful emotion. It’s also one of the most raw.
So many of us are grieving relationships we’ve lost. I see it all over social media, and hear it in conversations with friends. The older generation may be feeling the loss of what they saw in those Post covers that Rockwell created, but many of us are grieving the loss of the warmth we needed from those who saw them. The relationships that we hoped, after all these years, could be healed.
But maybe now we have a new chance.
Even if what Rockwell and The Post were selling wasn’t entirely real, it was a kind of dream. And as Mia Birdsong writes in How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community, “a dream is an imagined reality.” Meaning, a dream has the potential to come true.
So as we let go of the old dreams to reimagine new ones free from violence, where everyone’s humanity is honored, and our bond to one another grows stronger, we need to hold onto each other—if not to those we share blood with, then to those whom we can belong.
It’s the only way we’ll make it through.
Additional editing on this piece was provided by Kathy Cornwell
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