Chips Off Their Parents’ Old Spiritual Quest

Old families were all alike; every new family is new in its own way. Some children talk about “my mom’s house” and “my dad’s house” and “my second dad’s house.” Other children in their 20s discover dad’s new wife is younger than they are. Some children even have two parents of the same sex.

Recently, I picked up a copy of Metropolitan Home and read the story of two male nurses who lived together and always wanted a family. The men ended up adopting five orphaned crack babies. One man’s dad made furniture for the house. The other grandpa painted the place and helped put in a pool.

The story was about how the home won a design award, but it was impossible to read it without being moved and astonished by the brave new world of families.

It’s not only divorce and relocation that are changing the way children grow up. More and more children are showing the effects of their parents’ inner struggles as well. As the generation that came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s raised children in the ‘80s, the kids reflect phases of their parents’ spiritual life, just as the family album with evolving photos of dad’s long hair, mustache, beard and--finally--bald head show style changes.

Last week, my husband and I had a reunion with his old college classmate. We hadn’t heard from Jimmy Ray in more than 20 years. He was a good ol’ boy who was once called Bubba at his old Kentucky home. But now he was a divorced Seattle ad exec with moussed-up hair that ended in a tiny, immaculate ponytail. He wore silk baggy trousers and a white shirt that had no collar and buttoned across his chest on a diagonal. He reeked of aggressive after shave. He is now called Jamie!

Before the divorce, he and his wife had three daughters and two sons. The youngest son, Ross, one of two adopted kids, was traveling with Jamie. Ross, it turns out, is actually a Cherokee Indian but was raised in accordance with his mother’s religion. Ross, the Indian, was about to celebrate his bar mitzvah.

As if being a Jewish-Indian with a Scottish-Gaelic name wasn’t unique enough, Ross attends Catholic school. We never did discuss whether he was influenced by his father’s father--a Presbyterian minister.

Just as Jamie was still the same nice guy under all his fashion affectations, Ross seemed to be surviving his childhood with flying colors.

He’s a friendly 13-year-old boy who likes to play football and had the lead in the school play. He seemed like a kid who could be at home anywhere. My daughter deemed him “cool.”

We were the ones with the identity crisis.

The day after we met Ross was my daughter’s 12th birthday. I took her and a new girlfriend, Naomi, to the mall with the game arcade. My daughter had told me that Naomi was the smartest girl at the junior high and that she had read and memorized the dictionary.

On the way to the mall, Naomi told me her life story. She began by saying, “I’m ethnically Jewish.”

Ethnically , yet!

She continued, “My dad went to Yale and studied math. Then he went to Harvard Law School. Then he joined my grandpa’s law firm--the best one in New York City. But it was because my father was a brilliant lawyer. Not because of nepotism.”

Nep-o-tism!

“But something was missing in my father’s life,” she went on. “And that’s when he found Jesus. He also met my mother, a church secretary who had never been to college. They had me and five other kids and became missionaries.”

OK, this explained why I picked up Naomi at a house behind a church in the middle of an urban landscape filled with homeless people. But it didn’t explain her poise and her intelligence.

Those are probably the unexpected benefits of paving an entirely new road.