Stew Pot Families in a Stew Pot Nation

Much has been said about America being a melting pot, as if all the cultural, spiritual and material influences that have gone into this nation will combine, congeal, and blend into one substance. I can only imagine the result as becoming some kind of bland government cheese, bright yellow queso, packaged in a can for mass consumption. How disgusting that would be. In connection with the melting pot metaphor of a whole nation on the macro scale, on the micro scale there exists this idea of the so-called blended family, an experience many of us are familiar with in the little nations under our own roofs.

            I don’t really like the idea of a blended family either. Blend is too close to bland. Yet it is an experience everyone is familiar with, even if they are one of the rare birds whose family of origin hasn’t been riddled with divorce, loss, some kind of separation. (Show me them if you know them.) Everyone is familiar with divorced people hooking up with other divorced people, or those otherwise single people hooking up with someone who has already started a family, but who are no longer with the baby daddy or baby momma of their own kids. The other partner often has some other kids of their own involved. These two units come together, and are apparently blended if the union between the people is successful. In practice, it’s much more complicated, but can also be more beautiful.

            A more useful metaphor would be that of a stew pot family. I got the idea from a friendly family therapist from Ireland named Tony Fryer who thinks a blended family isn’t all that good for the reality people actually experience. Fryer writes, “‘Blended Family’ is a term I don't like. It suggests we are all to become alike. I like to call it a ‘Stew Pot Family’ (maybe because I'm Irish). This term allows for many different looking constituents but all are surrounded by a great gravy.” His idea is that the individual ingredients that make up a family, that have come together from many different families, is more like a stew where all the people represent their own ingredients of carrots, potatoes, mushrooms, and onion, but are swimming in the same juices  made from tomato paste and hearty broth.

            This has been my own experience in a stew pot family. My two older sisters are from two different fathers. My mom had my oldest sister when she was eighteen, then got married to my other sister’s father. They ended up splitting and then when she met my dad, they had me. They stayed together for over thirty years, until she died unexpectedly at a young age. I was 28, and my mom was 56. Then my father remarried and now I have an adult step-brother, and all the relationships that come from my step-mom’s family. That’s the stew pot I was born into.

            Yet the complexity of the stew pot family is also present in my life in other ways. I have a birth daughter, born when I was sixteen. She was placed for adoption, in an open adoption, where my family remained close with hers and we saw each other all throughout her life, continuing today. That joined our families together in ways not possible in closed adoptions. That’s another stew pot.

​            Then there are all the relationships from my wife’s family. Like me, she had already had children when we met, and I have two step-daughters. My wife’s parents are divorced, so that added its own complexity to our lives, but also its own possibilities. We all have our differences, but are swimming in the same gravy, and I thank Tony Fryer for helping us to think of it as a stew pot, rather than as some bland blending.  

 (I still like this song, even if I don't love the term "blended family")

By the same token, as an American, I much rather like the idea of us being a stew pot nation. Isn’t that tastier than us all being blended together into something that can’t be differentiated? Into a bland sameness where everyone believes the same things, does the same things, watches the same things, listen to the same things, and when they bother to read, read the same things. Our differences are great though, and they should be celebrated. But we also all swim in the same soup base that gives us a common language, feeling, core symbols and cohesiveness amid all the different ingredients. Perhaps another way to think about would be is that America is a stir fry with a lot of different elements are getting heated up together, but drizzled by the same collective sauce.

            Thinking of ourselves as in a collaborative stew together, all being boiled by common mounting pressures, might be an antidote to the divisions and differences of perception and focus that cause families and nations to split apart. America right now is like a couple who won’t talk to each other about the things that need to be talked about, but each side wanting to silence the other. Splintered by divorce, riddled by division, disrupted and diseased by malicious incisions within and against the national psyche, the United States is showing increasing signs of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called schizo-culture (following in the footsteps of the great systems thinker and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson). Schizo, from the Greek word schizéin, to divide. The divided states of America.

Part of the issue and division in our lives came in with the ascendancy of the nuclear family, a fiction and myth if there ever was one. I do not deny that biologically and socially a strong commitment between two partners raising their young together is a good thing. Pair bonding is an innate urge written into the soul and DNA of humanity. Yet the two-parent family that exists in isolation, having moved away from the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in exchange for a new job in a new town to work for some corporation, has created an extensive culture of disconnection. The freedom of movement has caused the stewpot to swirl and spill. Some bits are now outside the pot and all alone, without the resources an extended family provides, causing the other isolated members of the nuclear unit, each doing their own career, going to their own school, and engaging in their own hobbies and extra curriculars, to now have to rely on financial systems to meet needs that were once met by family and friends. This is one of the divisionary effects of our current economic arrangements.

These very socio-economic trends are in part what have so often caused people to disconnect and break apart instead of fulfilling those bonds. The same freedom to pick up and go and start off fresh somewhere else geographically for work or other reasons has also seemed to coincide with an increase in the way people just pick up and go from a struggling relationship, leave it behind to go on to the seeming greener pastures of a new relationship. Green pastures that often turn out to be an illusion. As Erma Bombeck noted, “The grass is always greener over the septic tank.” On the other hand, watering it is a good idea. All of these factors have led to increasingly complicated family situations in a society that has been pushed through the grindstone of industrialization, empire, and now deindustrialization and the collapse of the empire we inherited from Britain after World War II.
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The web of relationships people once knew and experienced has been shattered by these economic forces and the antisocial media of the internet. Increasingly isolated, much more stress is placed on primary relationships because the other relationships in our lives have faltered. James Hillman and Michael Ventura pointed out some of the problems that happen when we place so many of our needs for fulfillment onto fewer and fewer individuals in their 1993 book, We’ve Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World Is Getting Worse. 

In their dialogue Hillman said, “Why do we need this Norman Rockwell family, this make-believe ideal, that’s so rampant now in politics and in therapy? I don’t know what it’s doing for the body politic, but I know what it’s doing for therapy. For therapy, it is keeping an ideal in place so that we can show how dysfunctional we all are. It keeps the trade going [the therapy trade].”

Ventura replied that, “But even the Norman Rockwell ideal of the happy, self-sufficient family is a distortion of what families were for thousands, probably tens of thousands, of years. During that time, no family was self-sufficient. Each family was a working unit that was part of the larger working unit, which was the community -the tribe or village. Tribes and villages were self-sufficient, not families. It’s not only that everyone worked together, everyone also played and prayed together, so that the burden of relationship, and of meaning, wasn’t confined to the family, much less to a romantic relationship, but was spread out into the community. Until the Industrial Revolution, family always existed in that context.”

            Hillman goes on to point out how therapy in part relies on the idea of the dysfunctional family. That’s often why people end up on the reclining couch to talk about their problems in the first place. Before therapy came about, a person who was having problems would talk to an older relative, an aunt, uncle, grandfather, father, someone with experience, someone deemed wise, or just a friend who was a bit more impartial, but still had the closeness they shared in their heart. Now that kind of advice is mediated through life coaches and expensive therapy sessions that themselves thrive on the broken web of extended families.

​            Norman Rockwell’s perfect nuclear family never really existed anyway. As an aspirational ideal of the suburban American dream, it was painted into our magazines. For those who compared themselves against it, failure to attain this particular ideal led to shame. Others were forever outside of this norm to begin with. What was their place? The gay uncle, the lesbian sister, the mixed couple with their mixed kids -these never found their way into Rockwell’s fantasy, yet they have their place in the world and make it a better world to be in. Stew pot families are more accommodating to different ideas of what a family is and can become. The complexity of arrangement creates a complexity of taste. Those who want to continue on with bland Rockwellian monoflavors are welcome to do so, but equal freedom should be given to those who envision different ways of being, the ancient and the new. Something transcending the individual ingredients is liable to emerge when bold flavors are merged together.

This also gives us the opportunity to not abolish the family, as some clusters of groups on the left would like to do. Nor does it have to give way to a narrow idea of what family is as certain clusters on the right would have us limit the definition. Rather, as Anthony Galluzzo has pointed to in two recent articles, “How about instead expanding the family model—reinventing premodern extended family and kinship structures—to accommodate alternative, queer, familial forms alongside traditional families?”

A return to, and celebration of extended family systems can also give the current, overtaxed, overextended, alienated individual, a resource web that does not rely exclusively on financialization in place of the relationships people once had before money was inserted and started driving wedges between them where there had once been closeness and collaboration.   

What about calling up a cousin who is a mechanic for help with redoing the brakes on a car, in exchange for something you can help him with? Business has inserted itself in place of this kind of familial network and now, as things have further eroded, a lot of those kind of relationships don't even exist for people anymore. But we’ll need them again in the face of the declining systems that have taken their place.

It’s not that I think extended families would solve all interpersonal problems, or be able to replace all financialized transactions. But they might solve some of the loneliness that comes from “bowling alone.” It’s also another way forward towards reskilling ourselves and learning from our elders. Some of the problems facing the fragmented world come from rubbing elbows less with people from different generations. This only hanging out with people your own age pattern tends to flatten notions of time and perspectives about just how different the world can be made in a span of decades.

The stew pot family also has a place for strong ties with family friends, the other families all families come in contact with. These include and are strengthened by various subcultural affiliations and mutual aid societies, volunteer groups, social clubs where we go to meeting rooms and third places to join in the kinship of those who share our tastes and interests. For too long many in the counterculture and various subcultures have used these as replacements for family. Sometimes rightly so when an individual has had to flee their family of origin and find sanctuary somewhere else. Yet when the subcultures themselves are isolated from kindred groups, tribes and familial relations, they become their own echo chamber. Rubbing up against others and having creative friction with people whose ideas and beliefs are different from our own are just as important in these subcultures as they are in families, in local communities, to the bioregion and the nation. Third places, volunteer groups, and subcultural activities are also great places for people to meet the others, especially if they are looking for romance. No need to cede love to the technocrats as well.

In the end, America isn’t really one nation anyway, but a patchwork of regional and bioregional cultures. The flavors of one area differ greatly from those in another, but are all part of the overarching stew.* The particular flavors of each region might be considered as different kinds of stew. After all, Irish Stew isn’t the only thing around. There is goulash and gumbo too. The particular ways we create family in place, allows for the sharing of local knowledge, and family knowledge. This in turn allows for ground up resource sharing, pooling, and distribution of culture, rather than the top-down bland forms of pseudoculture imposed on us by the technocratic corpocracy. Allowing the individual microcultures of our families to simmer in their various stews together, can go a long way towards the creation of true diversity, of the differences and variation that become something we are happy to encourage, rather than denounce.

So, forget about trying to blend your complex family into some homogenized goop. Instead I suggest thinking of your family as a stew pot, with the different ingredients all adding to its great taste. And as we think of the family as a stew, so too we can think of America as a stew. If people want to try to recreate their life after a Rockwell painting, that’s there business. Yet in a pluralistic society, it can also be our business to make room in the pot for the pushed aside indigenous, the immigrants threatened with being thrown out, and the old-time immigrants whose families have been here for generations. Together we can make something tasty in a spirit of unity through diversity, and encourage the boldness of our unique funky flavors.
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* I have addressed the matter of bioregions and how that relates to the idea of hyperlocal microcultures in an essay for the winter 2025 issue of New Maps. It’s beyond the scope of this article to go into detail.

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