Family is as family does
I'm almost finished reading Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver. I've enjoyed it.



In my church and circle of friends, we talk a lot about family, in terms of who is our family. We are kind of a mismatched, damaged, healing, strangely accepting and sometimes optimistic group of people who come from a variety of families and church backgrounds. I consider many of them family outside of my blood-related family.

But we all have different ideas of who and what is family for us.

Towards the end of Pigs in Heaven, I read a few paragraphs about family that I found interesting. The whole book is the story of individuals in a blood-related family who are struggling to find where they belong. The story is an interesting weave of the family they are born with, mixed with the family they pick up along their way in life.

The characters are not important to finding something in this section of the book:

"When the social worker asked Turtle about her family today, you know what she said? She said she didn't have one."

"That's not right! She was confused."

"Yeah, she's confused, because I'm confused. I think of Jax and Lou Ann and Dwayne Ray, and of course you, and Mattie, my boss at the tire store, all those people as my family. But when you never put a name on things, you're just accepting that it's okay for people to leave when they feel like it."

"They leave anyway," Alice says. "My husbands went like houses on fire."

"But you don't have to accept it," Taylor insists. "That's what your family is, the people you won't let go of for anything."

I don't have any brilliant commentary on this. But the idea of not accepting when people leave as a determining factor in who we consider family, I found this interesting. And kind of beautiful.

I haven't quite made it to the end of the book to see how that whole family thing works out for everyone in the book, but I do so like things that make me think. I thought I would pause for a moment and share about it.

I will probably have more thoughts on this later.

C.T.