Overflowing with Family

Do you have a family? The question came over the phone from the stake family history coordinator. I had signed up to be a FamilySearch indexer, and she called to welcome me to the team and get to know me. Though “family” is a capacious category, I knew she was really asking two very narrow, specific questions: Do you have a husband? and Do you have children? Despite knowing that this kind, helpful, and sensitive woman was asking about my marital and maternal status, I decided not to tell her I had no husband or children, but to tell her the full truth, the full answer. 

“Yes!” I answered, “I have a family.” I then proceeded to rattle off details about my parents, eight siblings, four siblings-in-law, twelve nieces and nephews, two nieces-in-law, and the imminent arrival of my first great-nephew. A short but awkward pause followed. She had not expected my answer and wasn’t quite sure of her footing. I don’t recall which of us spoke first, but we pivoted and moved on in the conversation. She should feel lucky I didn’t also mention my 110 first cousins or how I had inherited two centuries’ tradition of childless aunts being adored by their families. And considering that not only am I a historian and genealogist, but also that I had just volunteered to help with the stake’s family history work, she’s really lucky I didn’t start spouting stories about my ancestors and how connected I feel to them. 

Asking if someone has a family, a common question in most church settings, is a sensitive way people ask about spouses and children without making widowed or divorced people and childless couples divulge what could be painful details of their lives. And at that level, I appreciate it. But it also causes a little itch at the back of my mind because even the sensitive version of the question (instead of the blunt questions, Are you a wife? Are you a mother?) carries implied limitations that obscure my own family life. 

I’m sure this stake worker doesn’t remember our conversation, but I remember it with pride. I was glad she asked if I had a family and not if I had a husband, because answering the latter question ends with “no” (which doesn’t bother me, but always seems to make my questioners uncomfortable). And, disturbingly, that answer is often followed with, “So, it’s just you, then,” or “So, you’re on your own then.” No, it’s not just me. No, despite living alone, I am most decidedly not on my own. But in the moment of these interactions, I’m not always prepared to list all the ways that I’m as far away from being on my own as one could practically get. So I was pleased with myself that in this instance I jumped on the chance to describe my family in all its glory, even if it was not the expected answer.

I live a life of plenty. I didn’t earn it, and I don’t deserve it, but I’m profoundly grateful for the fact that, particularly in family relationships, I’ve always enjoyed magnificent abundance. As the youngest of a large family and as a child of parents who also came from large families, the sheer number of my close relatives is staggering. Since that conversation with the stake family history specialist years ago, five additional nieces-in-law, a nephew-in-law, and twenty-four great nieces and nephews have joined my already bountiful family. I’m literally awash in a sea of relations. But my family isn’t just quantity.

The quality of my family relationships consistently delights and amazes me. My sense of a place in the world and my hopes for the future are so intertwined with how I think about my family that I cannot separate myself from them. Being the youngest means I joined a family already in progress, and I have virtually no memories of young childhood that do not involve my parents and siblings. The ensuing decades have taken those childhood interactions and built on them until I feel continually buttressed and grounded by their presence in my life. I stride out into the world with family streaming behind me like a cape and powering before me like a shield. They are the cup that consistently runneth over, the blessings showering from the windows of heaven I cannot contain, the dews of Carmel distilling upon me, and the human manifestation of the love of God, like the blossoms of a cherry tree, shedding itself abroad in my heart.

That family reality, those living, breathing people who belong to me and I to them, color everything: how I understand discipleship and baptismal covenants, my deep well of appreciation for ancestors, my convictions about the power that binds us and all of humanity together and to our Heavenly Parents. It shapes my work, my conversations, my friendships, my service, my free time. And my faith consistently reminds me that my relationships with them matter for the long haul.

And yet, often all of my familial richness and abundances are not acknowledged at church. I can’t determine exactly where the expectation comes from, but as a single and childless woman in a church that is so focused on marriage and child-rearing, I often feel as if I’m meant to check my existing and abundant family at the church door. Sometimes I feel that, because I don’t have a spouse or children, I should not consider myself blessed, or consider myself as having a family. A husband or children would be cause for rejoicing, or at least recognition, but other relationships—sisters, brothers, aunts, and uncles—are rarely considered as important enough to be celebrated at church. 

Being a sister is the cornerstone of my identity, both socially and spiritually. My entire life I’ve experienced a little thrill, a little frisson of excitement when one of my siblings introduces me to someone and says, “This is my sister.” That sentence and the powerful sense of belonging it brings delights me every time I hear it. Being a sister has been just a fact of life. I always appreciated it, and that appreciation has grown over time, despite limited discussions at church of siblings’ lifelong importance. Primary lessons in my childhood often discussed loving and getting along with siblings, but adult church curriculum focused only on obtaining and maintaining couplehood, followed by parenthood. 

For my siblings, I was the doted-upon youngest, the one they named via democratic election, but they never treated me like the baby or the family mascot. Instead, my siblings just incorporated me into their existing patterns. They took me to movies and on hikes; they let me join road trips while I was still a preschooler; they passed along their teenage and young-adult wisdom; they taught me about football and etiquette, about love, loss, and death. I was there when they left on missions, when they moved into college dorms, when they played sports, and when they were in hospital beds. And I was there when they eventually made their way back for reunions or Thanksgiving dinners.

As I aged, I reciprocated more and more, and in some ways I caught up with them. The differences in our ages telescoped down until they were meaningless. I now ask for their advice and give my own in return. We stand together in temple prayer circles. We reminisce about family reunions and childhood homes. We combine resources when buying Christmas gifts for our parents and wedding and baby gifts for our nieces and nephews. We rally and mobilize in times of crisis, illness, and grief. Losing our parents was a communal experience, the sharp edges of grief made smoother and more bearable because the experience was shared. 

I became an aunt a month before my twelfth birthday. I distinctly remember staring with my sister through the hospital nursery’s window at our new, tiny, Yoda-looking nephew. He was followed in succession by eleven additional, slightly less Yoda-looking nieces and nephews. So, by the time I was twenty-seven, just as most of my friends were becoming parents, I had spent more than half my life as an aunt. I played with my nieces and nephews, watched over them, joked with them, read with them, and talked to them about sports and literature and faith. They visited me when I lived far away for graduate school, and I got to know them when I circulated among their parents’ households for holidays. I sent birthday cards; they sent drawings, photographs, and postcards. I attended blessings and baptisms; they greeted me with posters and hugs when I returned from my mission. For me, being an aunt was just part of what it meant to have a family. Even now as those nieces and nephews have married and have children of their own, my relationship with them and their spouses grows in depth and meaning. And the feelings of protection and love I have for their children are fierce and powerful. 

Being a sister and an aunt are some of the most fulfilling and meaningful relationships of my life, relationships that become even more fulfilling and meaningful when I appreciate them for what they are, instead of trying to make them a phase I will outgrow once I marry or have children, or “settling” for them as substitutes for the husband and children I do not have.

Appreciating siblinghood means mining the full depths of this relationship instead of jettisoning it upon marriage, a fear a young woman once confessed to me. Siblinghood isn’t the leftovers if we don’t manage to get married. In a practical and eternal sense, siblinghood is one of the relationships we have with other people that endures. Being children of common parents is the one thing that spans premortal, mortal, and postmortal experiences. It is the only relationship with other people that has this claim. If I spend my time pining for a Latter-day Saint husband (who is statistically unlikely to appear), I squander all the love, growth, and possibility waiting for me among my sibling relationships. What an inestimable loss if I did so, if I spurned the gift that is siblinghood just because it was not couplehood.

Similarly, appreciating aunthood means being grateful for my nieces and nephews, for the chance to love them, interact with them, and learn from them as nieces and nephews; they do not take the place of children I won’t have. Nor could any potential children of mine take their place in my heart and my life. Being their aunt is its own emotionally, socially, and spiritually satisfying fact, one I appreciate more when I let it be what it is instead of squishing it into some lesser version of being a mother. 

There is untapped power in sister-ing and aunt-ing that is lost to me, my family, my church, and my society when I or others describe family solely in terms of marriage or parenthood. And it isn’t just sister-ing and aunt-ing that has unmined depths; there are deep wells of possibilities in uncle-ing, brother-ing, cousin-ing, and in-law-ing that languish or even deteriorate when we diminish or rhetorically ignore such relationships and the labors they entail. There is great potential in making claims to our other family relations. We can reclaim these rich family connections not just for recognition, but as a way of broadening our reach, as a way of drawing others to us, no matter their marital or parental status.

I have seen single, childless women and widowed empty nesters absorb and internalize the rhetoric that reduces all of our bountiful family experiences into one phase of family life and a phase not everyone experiences. They have described single life as a wasteland or wilderness, as a trial or punishment, and as a curse. Lessons are taught and talks given about family life. Rarely does the discussion call upon their own extended family experiences, but instead focuses on raising small children or getting along with a spouse. These relationships are not part of everyone’s daily life, and in many cases they are not part of others’ life experience at all. It is particularly striking when I’ve spoken to such women outside of formal church settings and discovered just how meaningful and varied their family relationships are, how much effort they put into being a sister or an aunt, experiences I have rarely, if ever, heard them share over the pulpit or in class. Additionally, expanding our view of family to include the ways it changes over a lifetime could make us more aware of what it is like to have adult children.

Appreciating a family that does not contain a spouse or children is not a compensatory act; it is an essential act, one that has to be directly advocated for. I work diligently to speak up about my family at church, to lay claim to its importance on its own terms, instead of allowing it to remain invisible or contorting it beyond recognition. Since that phone conversation over a dozen years ago, my family has experienced both joyous growth and devastating loss. We’ve wrestled with expectations around family reunions, faith, and concerns over health scares. We have amused ourselves nicknaming the different generations and spend time talking about the privileges and responsibilities of each generation to the other generations. We are keenly aware that perpetuating the bonds that connect and support us takes attention and intention.

In my bones and in my blood, in my joy and my heartache, I am daily grateful for the family I have. All of these people are central to me, not auxiliary, not placeholders for some unrealized, idealized future family. They are the real thing, here and now. And forever.

Amy Harris is an associate professor of history and family history/genealogy at Brigham Young University. Her research interests center on families, women, and gender in early modern Britain.

Art by Laura Erekson.