Chapter 7

What Constitute a Family?

I didn’t know how many children were my father’s biological children until when I was 12 years old. This was so because my father had adopted seven of his deceased brother’s children when I was only 3 years old. In African context my father is the head of the family and his primary responsibilities is to financially cater for the entire family. Raising the children is so important and it’s the primary responsibilities of my mother, though my father seldom intervenes in her duty only when necessary. That is the reason why in African culture, if a child lacks the basic values such as traditional beliefs and customs of his or her tribe, which include religion, obedient training, mannerism and other forms of norms of the society, the mother is often tagged a failure. In fact the early education of conformity and non-conformity of morals and values are learnt through early nurturing from your immediate family especially the mother.

Based on my short story what constitute a family is not just a nuclear setting of father, mother and their children. But it extended to compound family where every children of a household bonded and see each other as equals regardless of biological differences. The emotional attachments and support that we’ve grown over the years has bonded us that it was hard to recognize any parental differences among us.

Coming from a different family background and culture makes it hard for me to resonate with a contemporary family that is being practiced in some society. In my opinion, the nuclear family practice tends to isolate social and emotional intimacy among siblings and families. This to me is problematic considering the level of loneliness and boredom that has escalated to suicides, crimes and ill-health in recent times. I’ve  never heard of anti-depressant medication until I got to United States and neither did I experienced or imagined the existence of  “elderly assisted living” where  grandparents would live separately until my first job in Pennsylvania as a waitress in one of the facility for elderly people. And also, I still can’t imagine myself seeking an approval before visiting any of my siblings which  many contemporary family considered it to be “ an invasion of privacy”. That might explain why it’s the tradition for me to visit Africa every year since I’ve been living in Diasporas. The loneliness is too cumbersome for me to bear.

I will attribute this contemporary living as one of the characteristics of Individualist society. After all Newman, mentioned in the text that “United States for example has no strong tradition of large extended multigenerational families living together (page 197)”.