Understanding, Surviving and Creating Your Own Family

Excerpted from
Why Do I Love These People? Understanding, Surviving and Creating Your Own Family
By Po Bronson

At one point or another most of us have asked the exigent question Is the bond of family inherent in our human nature, or is it an intellectual construct that once saved a useful purpose hut is no longer really necessary?

Much has changed in the last forty years. Birth control has minimized the consequences of having sex, so sexual attraction doesn't have to lead to marriage. Women have become economically empowered and don't depend on men to provide for them. The elderly are less dependent on their children to house client. Young children have been granted rights by the courts and can even emancipate themselves. We need one another, but not like we used to. In general, participating in family has become more of a choice and less of an imperative. We've got options. For some, family has become a vestigial organ. It's there, hanging around like an appendix or a tonsil, but it is of little real use anymore.

Uma Thangaraj is one person who views family this way. She is unsure what the purpose of family is, and she is skeptical about whether a valid purpose will emerge, at least in her life. But her life story is revealing; like a sample of rock pulled from a mountainside, her life has layers that correspond to the different eras of family over the last few centuries. By studying these layers, we can understand how families today stack up against families of old. Are we better off? Is being able to choose whether to participate in family a good thing? Or is it allowing people to give up on family too easily?

Uma and I were walking from her van down to Lake Superior. It was mid-February, during a winter that dumped three hundred inches of snow. This was near the northern tip of Michigan's Upper Peninsula-a titanic spit of land that, if pointed out on a map, most Americans would presume is part of Canada. It's the kind of place where snowmobiles drive right up to gas stations. A church and a bar compete on every opposing street corner. There is a ski hill in the center of town. Uma's two children, Siddhartha and Samya, spent most of the weekends of their childhood on its slopes. Sid is now a freshman in college, Samya, a junior in high school. Uma works at the hospital in the marketing department. The name of the town is I lough ton-proud home to Michigan Tech University and a winter that lasts into May.

"This may be a third or fourth life for me," Uma said, her feet punching through the snow. "So much has passed that there are days in which India feels like an exotic, faraway land."

Life One: Uma grew up in a neighborhood of Madras that is only a quarter mile from great beaches on the Bay of Bengal. She woke to spectacular sunrises and the salty smell of the ocean. The River Adyar flooded in monsoon season. Those are her earliest memories, plus this: In the living area of their home sat a large particleboard box, as big as a footlocker and kept under lock and key. This held her dowry. Now and then Uma's mother would add to it-some silver dinnerware, or jewelry, or even pots and pans. As Uma understood it, this downy box was meant to give her and her future husband a head start in making their own home someday. It was not to be given to her husband's family as compensation, like traditional dowries-no, her family was supposedly past that, because her mother and her father were a love match. At a time in the mid-1960s when it was unheard of to seek out one's own partner. Mom and Dad met at college, fell in love, and defied their families. Both became professionals-Uma's mother was a doctor, her father an engineer and college professor. They were trendsetters. Uma expected a very modern life.

But Uma's father did not love her mother for very long. While they remained married, he secretly married a second woman in a nearby city. Uma's family was not Muslim, which-in another country-might condone this practice. They were Tamil Hindus in India, and bigamy was completely illegal throughout the country. Uma's mother discovered this other marriage when Uma was young, but did not divorce her husband, for one reason and one reason only-to preserve her daughter's future. Divorce was so taboo that if Uma's parents legally split, Uma would be considered unfit for marriage. Uma's mother insisted on one condition-the second wife would bear no children.

Because her father's bigamy was so rarely spoken about, Uma grew up not knowing it was hurtful. She remembers going to visit this woman with her father when she was about six. Her "stepmother" was always very kind, and jealous of Uma's relationship with her real mother. When Uma was eight, her stepmother came to live with them in Madras. Two years later. Uma's mother managed to get away by finding employment in Libya. Nobody considered it odd that Uma's mother did this, because it was (and is) common to work in oil-producing countries, where pay is far higher than in India. At school, classmates asked Uma who this other woman was, so Uma invented the idea that she was her "aunt."

The lesson her parents drew from their situation was that when it comes to choosing a partner, no one should trust young passion. But this was never communicated to Uma. She figured her parents married for love, so she would, too. Uma was a romantic, trapped in a culture that doubted whether passion could be the basis for marriage.