No Such Thing as An 'Average' Family

We were an average suburban Philadelphia family—with one big difference. My father died when I was 3 1/2. There were always reminders of his absence: the class assignment to make Father's Day cards, the father-daughter dances. One time a deer ran in front of my mother's car and broke the windshield, making her late picking me up from school. I thought, things like this don't happen when dads are driving. Another time, a friend's father leaned in a bit too close to my single and very attractive mother at a dinner party, and his wife got angry. I could hear them in the kitchen—voices tense and hushed. I knew that didn't happen to families that were whole.

This sense that we were a lesser form of family helped shape my life of education and research. If my town, my school and my own insecurities were telling me that being raised by a mother and two sisters isn't normal, then what is?

Over time, I found people who showed me the answer. I got to know them through my doctoral research in psychology and later as a gender scholar: more than 11 years of study and hundreds of hours of interviews with dozens of families outside the standard of Mom, Dad and the kids. My special fascination, no surprise, was single mothers. I also wanted to know about two-mother couples. I was particularly interested in their sons.

My research started in San Francisco, where I learned that single mothers and two-mother families were simply parents like any others. As one lesbian parent said, "Kids are kids. Society might throw a few issues at you, but all parents are dealing with the same things."

The project ended, but the little boys I met in those families stayed with me. My work felt incomplete. One day my daughter came home from school and casually said, "Max said I was unlucky because I'm adopted." As I was about to throw my body on her tender psyche, she shrugged and added: "But how does he know? He's not adopted." Exactly! How does anybody know? I suddenly had to know: how did not having a father in the house affect these boys I studied?

When I reconnected with some of the boys two years after my initial study, I found young men who were healthy, strong and happy. If they were different at all, it was because they were more in touch with themselves, more concerned with the feelings of others than you might expect from teenage boys. I saw in the eyes of these laughing, solid young men that families are what you make them.