Friendsgiving

19.11.23 Friendsgiving (52 Minutes)

SM Sarah McConnell

AS Audio Sample

AF April Few-Demo

SD Shannon Davis

LH Laura Heston

AA Alicia Andrezejewski

RD Rosalyn Durham

00:00:00

[music]

SM It's easy to feel sentimental about family Thanksgiving. After all, that's when moms and dads, grandparents and kids all eat together around one big table. But for some people, Thanksgiving can also be a time to handle tough decisions, like whether to discuss your queer relationship over turkey and stuffing.

AS I think that's why Friendsgiving has become so popular, especially among LGBTQ individuals, because you can garner that support from Virginia Humanities.

SM This is With Good Reason, I'm Sarah McConnell. Today we explore the phenomenon of Friendsgiving and how sometimes family isn't something we were born into, but something we create. Later in the show, we talk about how income inequality and workplace change have transformed how Americans celebrate Thanksgiving.

AS And what we're seeing is that leisure is not equitably distributed. The ability to take the time to do nothing, that's a privilege.

SM But first, April Few- Demo is a professor of human development and family science at Virginia Tech. She studied how Black LGBTQ people and other marginalized people make decisions about biological family and chosen family.

[music fades]

April, you have said that LGBTQ people might be making pretty complex decisions about which part of their lives they want to share around the Thanksgiving table. What kinds of decisions?

AF First of all, am I going to attend? And if I'm gonna go to Mama's House - and you if you're a Black LGBTQ individual, most likely you are. Not only are you going to turn your family's Thanksgiving, but you may have been invited to other Thanksgivings, other Friendsgivingís. So let's say I'm in a relationship. Let's say my name is Tenikka. I identify as a Black lesbian woman and I have a girlfriend, Kira. And so I'm going to have to think, hey, am I going to bring Kiara to my family Thanksgiving? And a lot of people of color who also identify as LGBTQ may do so - may introduce Kira to the family in little bits over time. So maybe Kiara shows up for July Fourth, as a friend - or Juneteenth and people will say, oh, you know, ìhey, Kira, how are you doing?î But then they see Kira at Thanksgiving. You might get a different reaction, like ìHm, I see Kiraís back againî. Kind of, what is this all about? And then all of a sudden you see Kira at Christmas. So, at that point, the family is forced to contemplate or think about, what is the meaning of this relationship that I have with Kira. If the family chooses to embrace Kira, then Kira it becomes an auntie. You might hear Kira be called sis. This is a very slow way of developing what we call fictive kin or what Kath Weston will say, hey, I'm bridging the two families here. These are the families that I'm choosing. But we know from research that many Black LGBTQ individuals - that their racial identity is very important to them, and it has a lot to do with the fact that whereas you can't hide, in some cases, a sexual minority identity, you can't necessarily hide your racial or ethnic identity, because when you walk in a room, you are read.

SM Have you ever seen this in practice? Have never been part of a family gathering where people were struggling to communicate across gender and race lines?

AF Oh, absolutely. I've seen it in my own family and I definitely have seen it being part of the Friendsgiving as well. What may happen is that Kira has been to the Fourth of July. Kira has come to Thanksgiving and now here is Christmas. My family is going to start asking me what is this relationship about? Or not. In the literature that's called the glass closet. So everybody sees what's happening but doesn't talk about it. So I can embrace Kira as someone who is important to me, but our sexual relationship may not be discussed. So that's when I come back to saying, all right, people of color are making decisions about whether or not they're going to participate in certain family rituals such as Thanksgiving. Because Thanksgiving is full of symbolism and rituals and family rituals provide people and families with a sense of identity, belonging. Rituals tell us who we are and who we can be. They tell us what our futures can look like and what we can imagine those futures can look like and whether or not I am deserving of that kind of future.

SM So what kinds of roles are families doling out around the Thanksgiving table, for instance? I mean, why does it matter whether we come to these family gatherings straight or LGBTQ? How is Thanksgiving sort of making it tough for these identities and rituals?

AF Well, I think Thanksgiving provides an opportunity to - for every person to reaffirm the commitments that you have to your family.

SM Yeah.

AF So that's part of what makes it tough for some individuals if, you know, that Mama doesn't like me having a girlfriend or a momma doesn't like me having, you know, a boyfriend. So, Thanksgiving to me at least I've seen in my family, and I think we also see it in the research, too - is a way of me saying, hey, I am committed to this family. I have obligations with this family. This is a family that provides me a safe space. If there's a piece of me that is rejected by the people whom I love most in the world, it becomes challenging. It provides a stage for ambivalence in gay and lesbian individuals toward their families.

SM In your study of Black lesbians, you found that sometimes people decided to be loud and proud with their families. Others were much more subtle, gradually bringing this information out and strategically.

AF Right, so if Black LGBT individuals feel that their family will be supportive or is supportive, you will see those people who are loud and proud, right. If an individual perceives families is as being a little less accepting, then you're going to see individuals thinking about ways that their families that they choose can be seen, but maybe not so much heard. Because you have somebody who is trying to bridge both a racial identity as well as a sexual minority identity. I am from the South.

SM You got it all.

AF So, I have an intimate relationship with racism looks like over the - you know, over the course of time. So, but I also have members in my family who identify as a sexual minority person. And so the ways that I see them making their choices is, OK - maybe the drip, drip, drip kind of introduction is typically done, but if you're in a Friendsgiving kind of setting where all the people around the room are LGBTQ identified, then you have room to talk about what it's like to be a LGBTQ member in your family of origin or in your families or extended families and what challenges you're facing.

SM Or just be free to be with each other, love each other and not feel judged.

AF Right. I think that's why you'll see ñ and why Friendsgiving has become so popular, especially among LGBTQ individuals, because you can garner that support. Not to say that you can't do it in your own family of origin setting. But I think people are making choices about which Friendsgivings that they are choosing to attend. Which Friendsgiving's are going to give them that sense of belonging and support and validation that perhaps sometimes the family Thanksgiving cannot provide?

SM How can families be more supportive to people at ñ I mean at all times of course, but especially over Thanksgiving?

AF I think families, what they have to do is they have to listen, hear the fears and the - the joys that people who identify as LGBT may experience, especially if they're testing the waters to see, you know, is this going to be a safe harbor for me? Is my family a safe harbor for me, or am I going to have to find another family? And I think that people should just let - let people be who they're going to be. And to be able to imagine, that if that person wants a family, that person is deserving of that family.

SM Absolutely. April Few-Demo. Thank you for sharing your insights with me on With Good Reason.

AF Thank you, Sarah has been an absolute joy. And thank you for allowing me an opportunity to render visible a population that is often invisible.

[music]

00:10:50

SM April Few-Demo is a professor of human development and family science at Virginia Tech. Lots of different types of families come together during the holidays. But what about when Thanksgiving means over-time rather than vacation time? Shannon Davis is a professor of sociology at George Mason University. She says we should pay attention to how labor pressures affect family life. Shannon, did you always have Thanksgiving off?

SD No, not exactly. So, I worked at the airport in the city that I went to school in, and I was the night person at the car rental agency. So, I closed at twelve o'clock on - on Thanksgiving, you got double time for working Thanksgiving. And as somebody who was again, trying to save her graduate school double time, I didn't have children, I had a cat waiting for me at home. It was absolutely fine for me to be the person who would close up on Thanksgiving. So, I stayed at work that night until midnight, closed up, and then was back at the mall at my other job at 6:00 a.m. on Black Friday.

SM I did the same thing. For years, my actual job was to work in a newsroom where we had to do newscasts on Thanksgiving. And it made me very empathetic with people who don't get the holiday off.

SD It does take a toll on folks. You know, I, again, was the person who volunteered and wanted the money, right? I wanted the money, but I volunteered because all of my coworkers had young children. I was the right person not having to worry about being away from - from family during what in the United States is really a family holiday.

SM Has the family holiday of Thanksgiving changed much in the last few years, would you say?

SD I would say that it has, because culturally we've changed our understanding of what holidays are, of what family means. But also, Thanksgiving as a place holder in our American culture has shifted as well. All of the stores are asking for our money. All of the televisions are asking for our eyeballs. There are multiple parades, not just in New York, but all over the United States, for people to participate in and go see. And then there's football or whatever sport might be happening at that particular time. And the notion of doing things as a family becomes the goal, as opposed to being with one's family as a goal of the holiday. That shifted significantly in the U.S. But that's not just about the holidays, it shifted in the U.S. around a whole other, and a whole number of other things around families - doing things with your family, as opposed to being with your family. But the holiday is a heightened time that we can really see it more often.

SM I have really loved seeing more and more people having Friendsgivings to - to create a bonding, joyful experience with people they actually choose to be with.

SD And that would have been unheard of even 30 years ago, that folks would choose to not be with their - their parents or their siblings or their aunts and uncles on what is ostensibly the family holiday in the United States. But instead, because of a number of choices that we've made culturally, as a number of choices that individuals have made, and frankly, the - the ability for us to have less time physically with people, but more time electronically with people, we can choose to, for example, FaceTime or Skype with your parents who may live on the West Coast, while you're having a friend's version of a Thanksgiving on the East Coast. And ostensibly, everyone be together at the same time. We have that ability now - and again 30 years ago with that - that was, you couldn't do that. You know, the ability to take that time to - to spend with the people that you care about doesn't only have to mean your face-to-face and living in the same roof, or sleeping under the same roof, or sitting literally at the same table with them to have that connection on the day of or the days around Thanksgiving.

SM Yeah, that makes me smile. Who hasn't had that experience of sort of passing around the iPad or the phone on FaceTime, right?

SD Yeah. And this works in particular for folks - if we're thinking about people who have professional jobs, who've moved from their family of origin, they've moved away from where their parents live, they live in a different place and they have kids. The technology can actually be used to enhance those relationships, even if people aren't physically with one another. That can make for an even more powerful kind of experience of Thanksgiving, where you're able to blend the people that you choose to be with physically - maybe they're your - your neighbors, maybe they're your coworkers, maybe it's a blending of everybody's families and friends in - in different places, and simultaneously or even later in the day, at a different part of the day Skype or FaceTiming with your - your sister or your brother or your parents or your grandparents. To allow for all of those connections to happen all in the same day and be able to still call it a day of Thanksgiving.

SM Do you know whether the amount of time off we do or don't get has changed in recent years? I wonder if what's happening now is more like the American economy, where the haves have more, and the have nots have less.

SD So that that is absolutely an accurate perception on your part. Right. That we see the 24/7 economy while it has benefits to us, right. We can go to the pharmacy in the middle of the night. If we need something, we can go to the grocery store in the middle of the night, if we need something. The difficulty is that somebody is working at the grocery store or the pharmacy in the middle of the night, which means they're not at home, they're not resting, their - their circadian rhythms are off. There are certain industries that have been able to afford more days off to give to their employees as perks and benefits. Those that are professional positions, those that are organizations that are professional serving organizations, absolutely have the ability and in fact, see that as a benefit they want to give to their employees, because labor costs are the most expensive cost in most organizations. You want to keep that talent. You want to keep the people who are - who are your employees. You want to keep them happy. So giving them extra days off around the holidays, that's not going to hurt anybody. Productivity goes down around the holidays anyways. Folks are really not mentally in the thing, right? Theyíre thinking about - they're thinking about what they're going to do during the holiday. But for the industries that thrive on service of others, the airline industry, again, thinking about my own experience, I worked in the car rental agency. If you're flying somewhere to go visit your family for the holidays, you're going to either need someone to pick you up or you're going to need a rental car.

SM Right.

SD So there are certain industries where you will continue to have people who are working those jobs. And those are the folks who, for a number of reasons, choose - or may not have a choice, to be working that that may be time and a half or double time shift that no one else wants because it's necessary for the organization, the company to - to continue to continue operating.

SM How important is it to have leisure, these days off, these holidays?

SD Oh, it's critical. And leisure is both time for one's self as well as time for building those relationships and strengthening those relationships. And what we're seeing is that leisure is not equitably distributed. The ability to take the time to do nothing, that's a privilege. The ability to sit and veg in front of the television and binge watch a television show over a holiday break or go to the movies, because we all know that every new movie comes out during either summer or the Thanksgiving. Right. That requires you having time to be able to do that, as well as the exorbitant amount of movie costs now, to be able to go see a movie. But more importantly, the idea of leisure is not equitably distributed across all people. Certainly, women and men have different experiences of leisure, parents versus non-parents. And certainly, by work status - the extent to which that the kind of job that you have affords you with different kinds of leisure opportunities.

SM It seems like what you really want to be able to give is leisure, freedom, love?

SD And not in that order, right. So love, freedom, leisure, perhaps. But the way in which that we now, in contemporary American society, think about family isn't about the biological units of - of long ago. Long ago, 30 years ago. Right. It's more of how we have created our - our community around us to support us, to sustain us and to help us find the meaning that it is that we're seeking, whether it be personal meaning or some other kind of meaning.

[music]

SM Shannon Davis is a professor of sociology at George Mason University. She recently coedited the book Gender in the 21st Century: The Stalled Revolution and the Road to Equality. We close today with a story about the life and eventual death of one queer Friendsgiving tradition. Writer and editor Laura Heston brings us this essay about turkey dinner, drag performance and dance parties.

[music fades]

LH The first Friendsgiving was an accident. In 2005, Mikey, Ben and Brian lived in Washington Heights in an apartment in which they were so crammed, it was literally hard to turn around. It was in this apartment, they made the first turkey and stuffing to bring to Lindsay's apartment for what, in retrospect, would be our first Friendsgiving. No dining table, we all held our paper plates and sat on chairs and couches or just stood in the kitchen. After dinner, we all went out drinking to hidden gay bars in upper Manhattan.

[light bar commotion]

I picked back up on a not at all secret affair with a woman whose boyfriend was conveniently out of town. The first fall snow fell that night. It was unlike any Thanksgiving I've ever had. My God, I wanted more.

[music]

The next year, Friendsgiving was held at Melanie and Emmet's apartment. While Melanie shared a vegan turkey that looks like a leathery balled up sock, the boys tackled the turducken, which looked even grosser than it sounded. We drank. We danced. We Friendsgiving-ed. By the next year, everyone was already living in Brooklyn. As the last act of Manhattan, Mikey proposed to Ben over McDonald's breakfast and a one-hundred-page poem he wrote. They moved with Brian to the apartment in South Slope with a small backyard and patio that would serve as Friendsgiving headquarters for the holidayís remaining years.

[chatter]

Typical Friendsgiving the festivities started with appetizers at one, moving on to dinner at three. This was followed by a nap and video or board gaming segment of the evening, desserts and coffee and walking in mass to local bars and dance clubs. Somewhere in there we would clean up and pack Tupperwares to send people home with. In the course of the night, people would come and go, smoke pot, call their relatives, get drunk, sober up and get drunk again. It was unapologetically pleasure-centered, but warm and safe. Sure, it was a bit debauched, but I had a feeling being exactly where I wanted to be.

[music]

Instead of watching football, we play Mario Kart, Pictionary or volleyball. And there was dancing - always dancing. If we didn't go out to dance, weíd push aside the coffee table and Mikey and Benís two fake leather couches, switched off the lights and turn on the actual miniature fog machine they bought and danced.

It's painful to admit, but I don't think I'd ever experience much joy at family holidays before Friendsgiving. I felt anxiety and fear and obligation and even love, but not joy. And among the mainstays of dancing at gay clubs, post-turkey Craigslist cruising, hooking up, sexual puns and all of our game playing - queer sexuality was absolutely at the center of it all. That there were always some straight-identified people there, it was a space where queers with the majority. Queer Family Friendsgiving took the sacredness of Thanksgiving, a quintessentially American holiday celebrating both domesticity and consumption, it made it profane. We played a domesticity through cooking for each other and eating around a big table, while were also making it farcical. The love was genuine, but the ritual felt like play. Friendsgiving was family drag as well as family.

Friendsgiving's 2015 theme was Drags-Giving. There were suddenly dozens of YouTube videos teaching people with masculine jaw lines how to create the illusion of high cheekbones through contouring.

AS [YouTube video] Hi guys. Welcome back to my channel. So, for today's video, I'm going to be teaching you all how to do a basic drag queen look.

LH At Drags-Giving, dressing flamboyantly in the garb of somebody of a different gender was not played for laughs. The goal was to embody convincingly and playfully a version of oneself not normally seen. In this context, because it wasn't a joke. Support and care were required. It was a space of trust and vulnerability as much as it was about play. And it was thrilling. Mikey, our consummate host was dressed as a southern 1950s housewife, complete with big hair and checked apron. I was a naval private on shore leave, and several other attendees were inspired by the esthetics of various pop divas and socialites. While other people around the country were dressing for dinner in their Sunday best, we were dressing up in a different way.

[Theme from RuPaul Drag Race]

Then the babies came.

[classical music, baby cries]

Mikey's brother had a baby, then to Ben's sister had a baby, then three. Brian became Uncle Brian. Then our friends, Audrey and Frank, brought their one year old to drag's giving. We were happy to have her, she was the source of both humor and curiosity. But the tiny tot was nearly tripped over by several gay men having Jell-O shots in heels, and the family left early.

In 2017, though Friendsgiving still happened to name ñ it came together last minute and was fairly intimate. At Friendsgiving's peak, there are a couple dozen people eating spinach dip and smoking cigarettes on the patio. That year, though, we were 10, more than half of us married, and a baby stayed through dinner. The edge was gone.

[jazz music]

Children, the ones we were planning and the ones we related to, were coming between us. And the specter of death from Brian's cancer diagnosis and remission, to the compromised health of our respective parents was making things weightier.

Various couples wanted to spend holidays with their so-called real families to visit with the kids and see their own parents more. Ironically, this kind of deterioration of queer social life - for our friend group and others - is the consequence of greater social acceptance. Domesticity may have killed us after all.

Domestic coupling severs people from their broader communities and makes daily concerns and struggles simply personal. It motivates people to understand both successes and failures as a result of personal striving, or lack of it. Rather than something shaped by structural conditions like economic and political shifts. Consumption is the carrot that's always moving. There are always better neighborhoods, bigger houses, faster cars and more effective anti-aging creams, all these things take money and keep the labor force working harder and harder. Looking back, it does seem a bit naive to think it might last. It seems more and more that I mistook a life course phenomenon, those normless years between college and adulthood through our 20s, for an experiment in critical family transformation.

And yet naive, though it may have been, there was something distinctively queer about our Friendsgiving. It did show us a different way of organizing intimacy, an alternative both to biological families and to normative friendship. This lesson is something we'll take with us as we develop our own separate, more normative families that might make them a little less exclusive than a hetero-normative family might be. Maybe Friendsgiving wasn't revolutionary, but it was our version of a real queer utopia.

[music ñ Blind by Hercules and Love Affair]

SM Laura Huston earned a P.H. in sociology at UMass Amherst and works as a reference editor at Oxford University Press. The story was adapted from their dissertation, Queering Kinship: LGBTQ Parents and the Creation of Real Utopias, which they're revising for publication. This is With Good Reason, we'll be right back.

00:28:00

[music]

SM Welcome back to With Good Reason. From Virginia Humanities, I'm Sarah McConnell. We're talking about how Thanksgiving brings people together, whether you're with your biological family or your chosen family. And chosen families go back farther than you think. Our next guest is a scholar who's found evidence of nontraditional families in a surprisingly traditional place, the works of William Shakespeare. Alicia Andrzejewski is a professor of English at the College of William and Mary.

[music fades]

SM Alicia, your research shows so many unexpected family formulations in Shakespeare's plays, I guess now we'd call them alternative families or chosen families. What types of groupings are you seeing in the plays?

AA Well, it's interesting to think about how Shakespeare is held up as this epitome of Western civilization. You know, the canon - everyone knows who Shakespeare is. He's the most produced playwright. And all of his dinner parties, all of his, what we might call the traditional families are - I wouldn't say massive failures, but, you know, big parties don't go well. If you think about King Lear's retirement party, you know, his favorite daughter refuses to say just that she loves him. If you think about the dinner party and Macbeth, where he sees Banquo's ghosts and his wife is desperately trying to, you know, salvage the situation. I mean, there's just so many examples of families gone wrong. Even Hamlet, right. Shakespeare's most famous play opens up with a wedding feast. His uncle has married his mother. His father has just died. You know, he's saying they're using the same meat that they used for the funeral, for the wedding. So this is some dark family gatherings and dark traditional families and moments of unexpected kinship and intimacy are - are fleeting, but they're there.

SM What's an example of one of the plays where you catch a glimpse of a nontraditional family coupling, that you're talking about?

AA So my absolute favorite is in A Midsummer Night's Dream. You know, it's one of his most beloved comedies. It's often the play that parents will give their children as an introduction to Shakespeare, because it has fairies, it has animals. But it's actually very dark when it comes to how the family functions. The play opens up with a father threatening his daughter because she doesn't want to marry the man that he wants her to marry, with death. Theseus, who's sort of ruler of Athens, says you will marry the man your father wants you to, or you will be put to death or sent to a nunnery. And that's very dark. That's not a happy family, that we would say is functioning well. But there is this fleeting moment in it that is so gorgeous. And so, we meet the fairy queen and king, Titania and Oberon. And they're married, they have no children, and their fighting has completely destroyed the landscape of fairy land. And they're fighting over this Indian boy, that Titania has made all her joy. And Oberon wants to take this boy from her. And so Titania has this moment where she tells us about the relationship she had with that boy's mother. And she talks about laughing with this woman and gossiping. It's the complete opposite of what we've just seen - like destroyed landscape, flooded landscape, fathers and daughters fighting. And it's two women, you know, and there's a lot of eroticism in the speech, too. And she ends it with, for her sake I bring up the boy, you know. For her sake, I will not part with him. For her sake, I'll bring him up. I just find that moment in a play where none of the family seem to be functioning well. But there is this fleeting moment of intimacy and kinship and eroticism among women - something different than the family hierarchies we see is so important.

SM This was also a period in our history where we were beginning to transition from sort of contractual marriages, to marriages that had more romantic possibilities and perhaps then exploring all couplings with romantic possibility.

AA Yes. And I think that Shakespeare is absolutely exploring that transition in his play, from arranged marriages to companionate marriage. But there has also been a lot of research done on even when that shift happened, right - from this more hierarchical, where the husband is the king of the household and, you know, if two souls get subsumed into one, whose soul is getting subsumed into who's? You know, and even as the language changed, the power dynamics, not so much. And we still see that today. And so, I think he was really grappling with all of this.

SM What were some of the other plays where we show nontraditional ways that people found each other and gravitated toward family members or friends in a way that was much closer, than perhaps to their real families?

AA Mm hmm, okay - The Winter's Tale. The play opens up with a heavily pregnant queen, Hermione, and her husband and her husband's friend, who has been visiting. And the scene quickly devolves into Leontes, the king, her husband becomes convinced that the child Hermione is carrying is his friends, not his. And so, he imprisons her. He orders that the baby be killed. She gives birth in a jail cell. One of my favorite lines from that scene is she's - she just says, I want my women to be with me. I just ask that my women be with me. And then he drags her three days postpartum to testify against the case against her. And she has this eloquent, moving speech, but she knows that his mind won't be changed. In the meantime, he's ñ heís sent two people out to ask an Oracle for the truth. So, they come in and, you know, the Oracle says Hermione is chaste.

[both laugh]

AA Like you are wrong. And he still doesn't believe it, and she collapses. And throughout this whole first part, she has this woman that was waiting on her, who's always fighting for her. And so when Hermione collapses, then all of a sudden, Leontes, her husband, has this change of heart, you know. Oh, I must have been mistaken. And then the son they have also dies. You know, so basically, this man has destroyed his family. But Paulina sort of takes Hermioneís body off stage and tells everyone that she has died. And so 16 years pass, we learn that her daughter has survived. We also see glimpses of Leontes being all, you know, boo-hoo, you know, beating up on himself. Like, - whatever. You know, like I lost everything, I'm so sad. But by the plays end, his daughter comes back to her father's court and Hermione is revived by Paulina. And we learned that - that they have been living together for 16 years. And there are some scholars that say it's - it's through magic that this happens. But ñ

SM Yeah

AA I am of the belief that these women, their fierce connection is what kept Hermione alive for those 16 years, so that she might see her daughter. And in that final scene, she does not talk to her husband. The only time she speaks is when she sees her daughter and she says, my own, right. So here we have these women who have kept each other alive under incredibly violent circumstances. And it's just a gorgeous moment.

SM When did you first have such a moment where you thought, oh, this speaks to me, this idea that somebody can show that our chosen families can be as powerful and as sustaining as the families are born into?

AA That's an interesting question. So, my research really is focused around pregnancy, and I'm very interested in Shakespeare's pregnant characters and how they challenge our own ideas of what pregnancy looks like. You know, that only women can get pregnant, usually they're in a legitimate marriage with man, and the babies always carry to term - like all these assumptions that don't really reflect lived experiences. Right. There's so much wrong to me with the fact that there's that divide in thinking about pregnancy as something that only happens in this traditional family. It's not true now and it wasn't true then.

SM We are so infinitely more complex, all of us - right, then weíre allowed to believe.

AA Yeah, right. And my students asked me a lot, and it's a fair question. You know, questions like what did what did early modern people believe back then about this? Or how did early modern people think about pregnancy or, you know, same-sex desire? And -and I always asked them, I said, if I turn that question back to this room, would you all give me the same response? You know, and how can they say no. Right, so I think it's so important when it comes to our ideas about the family and intimacy and who you want to share meals with or banquets or whatever if you're in a Shakespeare play right, you know, not to oversimplify it.

SM Right. And if left to our own devices, we've probably got a wild and complex range of thoughts on any of those concepts that are not influenced by anyone else.

AA Right. I think that's part of why I'm choosing to write my book on Shakespeare, because he's so familiar. He's so taught. He's the most produced playwright year after year in this country. And, you know, I want to show how much gets lost when we marginalize those different kinds of intimacies. When we privilege the traditional family, right, that sits around the table with the golden retriever at the feet of the father, right?

SM Yeah.

AA And so if I can show that - and I - and I truly believe the evidence is there, that this wide variety of kinship and family formations and intimacies is present in Shakespeareís cannon. And that's a start to expanding how we think about family.

SM That's really inspiring. You know, this time of year when so many people are heading home or getting together with traditional family, do have any words of encouragement for people who simply find those occasions difficult and would rather embark on a kind of Friendsgiving. What - what would Shakespeare maybe have to say?

AA I donít know what Shakespeare would have to say. But one thing that I would say is that this idea of the happy family can be so damaging. I would say expand your idea of what family is and what it looks like, and to invest time and energy into the people who, you know, lift you up and give you strength. And like literally in The Winter's Tale, Paulina revived Hermione from her - what her biological family did to her, you know, her husband - brought her back to life. And if we can find and hold on to people in this world who do that for us, we should. And we should celebrate that around times like this. And so I - I want everyone to have happy moments this - this Thanksgiving. But just know that if it's not all happyÖ

[music]

SM You're not alone.

AA Yeah. You're not alone. And Shakespeare was writing about you and for you. And maybe that's why his plays continue to endure. They help people feel a little bit less alone.

SM Alicia Andrzejewski is a professor of English at the College of William and Mary. Coming up next, helping modern families in crisis.

00:41:20

SM Rosalyn Durham is an expert on helping families in crisis, and she says the holidays are especially tough for kids in foster care. But a caring social worker can make a huge difference.

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SM Rosalyn, as a social worker, before you were teaching you worked with families in crisis. What are some of the most heart wrenching issues that children and parents face during these, sort of, dysfunctional times?

RD Parents are being separated from their children and the children are being separated from their families. And then you going into a totally new home, you may be in a different culture and different race. How do you adapt? Mom and - or dad feel like they have done all that they can. And now because a wrong turn, their children are being taken away from them and the familyís realizing that I made a mistake. And when is my child coming back home? How are they going to feel? Are they going to want to come back home? And then youíre looking at the children and how sometimes they blame themselves. You know, if I didn't tell what happened to me, you know, I would have been home. Is it my fault that my siblings and I are no longer here? You know, will my mother, my father, look at me again as their own? And theyíre crying. I mean, mom cries, children crying ñ itís a difficult task.

SM So rarely do either the child or the parent want that, right?

RD On a regular basis, the family does not want to be separated. A mother doesn't want to be separated from their children, but they don't want to see their children hungry. They don't want to see the children on the street. But for the most part, no. No family wants to be separated.

SM Who do you think the separation is hardest on? The youngest children or the teenagers?

RD That's - that's a hard question. I think it is harder on a teenager because they are familiar with their family. You - you may be taken from your community. So, it may be challenging, more for an older child rather than a - perhaps a toddler. When I was a social worker, when I dealt with foster families, I had to deal with a lot of civic groups. And I actually was in the adoption court service unit. Sometimes you go into a home and the foster parent is not very nurturing. They are looking at it as a job. And the child needs to be nurtured, someone to comfort them. And when you feel that the foster parents are not receptive to that, it can cause an issue. You can't take every child home. You can't take - take any child home. But you do think about it when you when you go home. What can I do? What didn't I do? Should I move this child to another foster home? So it can stay on your mind consistently until the change has been done.

SM Do you think that in foster care, often the holidays and Thanksgiving can be especially lonely time for children who are separated from their birth parents?

RD Oh, most definitely. Particularly if the biological parents don't come or they can - let's say you're expecting your parent on Christmas. Maybe they come the day after Christmas. Oh, my goodness. This is very lonely. You - we bring gifts to the children, food and everything. And we're - again, we're excited about this. And then we let them know that your parents are coming. Well, sometimes the parent doesn't show up, or all the family of the children, of a foster parent, their family's coming and everybody's excited. But nobody from that foster childís family has showed up. They're sitting in a corner there watching this and then wishing that, why isn't my family like this. So it's - it is hard. Holidays can be hard. We think that is exciting because weíre bringing them gifts. And, you know, we - they put a list out, and we got them everything. But a lot of times, they want to see their mom. They want to see their dad. They want to see their siblings. Nothing replaces a parent. A child can be happy at one moment and then the next, you know, they're thinking about oh, last Christmas. My family was together, or last Christmas my - my mom was wasn't on drugs.

SM What's your best advice for your students when helping them help foster families?

RD Listen to them. Be a good listener and serve what the family and the child needs. And deal with their issues, not what you think the issue should be. Because like, you never know why an individual decides they want to come into social work. And we - we have our own reasonings for coming into social work.

SM I wonder if children this small need their own version of Friendsgiving, as it's called, where they come together because they all share the same thing, they're lonely, it's the holidays, and they miss their biological family.

RD Most definitely. Like I said, when we're talking about, the younger and then we're talking about teenagers. Young - if you if you're looking at a toddler, if you're looking at, let's say from two to five, you may not understand what's going on, or you're excited because everybody's excited and the gifts and the - and the food in and, you know, people are happy. But when you're a teenager, you may - you may not understand why you're here. And it can be sad for that teenager to encompass everything is going. Or there are times you don't want to be happy, because if I'm happy, my siblings are not happy, I'm happy, my mother's not happy. So sometimes you go into your own circle, your own world, these teenagers go into their own world. And because they don't want to be happy, because their families not here. It just - it can be discouraging for them. Why should I be happy if you're not happy? My mom is in jail, or my father's in jail or, you know, my mom is homeless, my mom is on the street - why should I be happy?

SM It the hardest job helping foster parents be good parents to the children? Or is the hardest job helping the biological parents create the kind of family the children need?

RD I would say that the hardest job is probably the parent. Our foster parents, they go through training now to teach him how to be good providers for the children. But because of the guilt that a biological family may be feeling, and perhaps even if they can't meet all the goals that have been established, I think that can be the hardest challenge in trying to reunite a family, when there - the issues are tremendous. And a lot of times you may have a family that was separated because the mother doesn't have a job. And her goal is to say, in six months I'm going to have a job. I'm gonna have a job, that Iím gonna have a nice home, Iím gonna have a car. I want to have all these amenities that I - so my child can return. But this not realistic when you're working on a - a minimum wage job. Sometimes when you reunite, it may not be the same situation that your children were in, that they may have been in a wonderful foster home and had all the amenities. But ñ and you don't have those things. And then that transition to that child going back to - to their home. That she's satisfied the goals that that were requested but is not is the same as the foster home. So the challenge is, I think the larger challenge is working with the biological parents.

SM What do you think in your upbringing made you want to be a social worker?

RD Well, my goal in life is to serve. And I wanted to serve, and I wanted to help. And with my family, if there was a family in need, we did not hesitate to help. You didn't really have to ask for help. Itís like, we saw that there was a need, we're going to help. And so I wanted to give back from what was provided to me to give to someone else, and provide whatever I can. My family's very close. They're not selfish. And I didn't want to be selfish. And if someone gave that to me was my responsibility to give that back.

SM The challenges families do face, if you could wave your wand - is there a small thing that we as a society could do better? If you could just say, let it be so?

RD To serve and to respect families, even those who perhaps went astray. Perhaps - perhaps they abuse or are they hurt their children and they did not mean to do that. Respect them and - and try to help. I think that we have a stigma on families after their child has been taken away or perhaps even placed in foster care. Our purpose in life is to forgive. Our purpose in life is to love. And so we can give back, then we can help keep families together and not try to separate for small, minute things. We're looking for important services that can go into - into the home. We're going through so much in this world now, I think we forgot how to help. I think we forgot how to love. And we forgot certainly how to - to give back. And I think if we learn how to give back and respect individuals, then perhaps we can stop some of these challenges and things that are going on in our world.

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SM Rosalyn Durham is the child welfare stipend coordinator at Norfolk State University's School of Social Work. Major support for With Good Reason is provided by the law firm of McGuire Woods and by the University of Virginia health system, UVAHealth.com. With Good Reason is produced in Charlottesville by Virginia Humanities. A production team as Allison Quantz and Cass Adair. Jeannie Palin listener services. Some of the music from today's episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks this week to Laura Heston, George Mocharko, Bill Foy at Virginia Tech, Deb Farmer and Todd Wasburn at WHRV. For the podcast, go to withgoodreasonradio.org. Iím Sarah McConnell, thanks for listening.