“Families—you have to love them.”

For many Americans this would be something said in a sarcastic tone, after a tense Thanksgiving dinner or a Fourth of July family reunion at which emotional fireworks exploded.

For most Indians, it would be a straight, sober statement of fact. You have to love your family. It’s expected of you; you expect it of yourself. Indians don’t joke that they’ll need “holiday-strength Prozac” because they’re going home for Divali, Chhath, Onam, or any of the many festivals and occasions when family members regularly come from the four corners of the earth to celebrate together. They just do it.

This idea that “family” is such a sacred cow in India intimidated me when I first thought about marrying an Indian and settling here. Almost everything I’d read, every Hindi film I’d seen, showed the united, multi-generational family as the ultimate ideal. If a son had to give up his dream career to look after his parents, that was seen as a magnificent sacrifice! If elders said, “Jump," children responded, “How high, sir?” Brothers and sisters pined when they were apart, and danced with joy when they reunited.

"Family Ties" by David Derr

I had a strong feeling of “been there, done that” about all this. When I was a kid in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the idea of the American family seemed to come straight out of Norman Rockwell paintings—freckled kids, two attractive parents, four grinning grandparents. Television sitcoms taught us that father knew best—rather, mom knew best, but she let dad think he did. Sibling rivalry was shown as a harmless quirk of family life that got kids in sticky situations, from which they always were rescued by wise parents or big brothers.

Anyone with half a brain knew that pretending this was true of all families involved a truckload of hypocrisy, but we tried, at least until we discovered the writings of Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer. I read them; I had no desire to spend my entire life baking bread and cookies, even if they were in the more exotic form of chapattis and naan khatai I wanted to use all my talents and reach my full potential. I had no desire whatsoever to take orders from anyone.

But there was this small problem of having fallen in love and wanting children. I thought it over. The family of my fiancé seemed to consist of reasonable people, most of whom were living in England at the time. How bad could it be? I decided to take the plunge. Thirty-five years and five beautiful, brilliant, competitive children later, I have reached a few tentative conclusions about family life—not just my family, not only in India.

First, there are no worthwhile generalizations about families. Every family equation is as individual as the people in it, and the “typical Indian family” is about as easy to find as the “typical American home.” Not only is “each unhappy family . . . unhappy in its own way,” as Tolstoy told us, but each happy family has its own style. For one family, happiness is a hike in the mountains, shared; for another, it’s sitting around mulling over which movie to go to and what to have for dinner. For some, even loud family arguments that would scare an outsider are considered nothing but a healthy indoor sport.

That said, it’s also true that in every family there will be a brother-in-law who sits through family visits generating vibrations that repel conversation. An aura hangs over him, an unspoken impression that he is not amused, that his expensive socks have been lost in the communal laundry, and that the rest of you watch too much mindless TV. There is always an aunt (or uncle) whose eyes put a price on everything in the house, thinking the total value is your worth. There are children who compute each loving gesture, each gift lavished on others as though it has been subtracted from their share. There is a woman who thinks the cooking is strange, and someone whose greatest happiness lies in proving that they are the most neglected and victimized of the whole clan through no fault of their own, of course. There are nervous people who play with their food as voices are raised. And there are others who will take advantage of this.

In short, in all families, everywhere, there are characters. Some of them are awful. In no society on earth do families consist entirely of reasonable people, of nurturing elders and flourishing children. This is as true in India and Asia, where the family is traditionally held in reverence, as it is in the supposedly more individualistic West. Everywhere, the most important factor in holding families together or tearing them apart, as far as I can see, is not the cast of characters on the family stage, or how well they play traditional roles; it’s their attitude.

If the attitude of a majority of family members consists of, “Why do I have to put up with all this?” then the family will fall apart. If the attitude is, “Families are like this, but they’re still family,” then it holds together. This latter way of thinking is probably more common in India, which may explain why statistically more families stick together here—either as couples or as several generations living under one roof.

As more people are jammed into cities and rushed through the modern workday, of course, this attitude is dying out everywhere. More and more people worldwide now have the feeling that home should be their port in a storm. “I have to put up with garbage all day at the office, I don’t have to put up with it at home,” exists as the battle cry of many modern men and women when they go home, pull up the drawbridge, and find comfort in their private castles and the nuclear families they shelter.

Some may find that comfort, but many may not if they have not learned the lesson that big, inclusive families teach automatically along with potty training, shoelace tying, and learning how to give and take love. That lesson is tolerance—the ability to remember that a person has a good side, even when only the bad side is on display.

Children in united families—whether multiple generations live together or just see each other on vacations—will see that Great Grandmother, even if she looks like a witch and yells like a crone when they track mud in her room, still loves them or buys them treats or tells them stories or some combination of those actions. They will know her as a part of who they are. They will see that the uncle whose anger goes off like Krakatoa also can be the funniest guy in the room when the devils are not on him. They will learn that making small compromises doesn’t kill them and that their personalities remain intact when they take advice. If they’re lucky, they’ll know that they can love and be loved by people of all ages, sizes, and types—if they’re less fortunate, they’ll at least know that for everyone who doesn’t love them, someone else exists who does. They will have seen that bad and good come packaged together in the same soul, and will have learned that they can deal with both.

Obviously, these lessons are useful not only in building families, but also in building lives that are spacious and strong. People need to know these things to live in any kind of community, to live well in the world. “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam,” as the Vedic scholars say, or “the world is one family”—the biggest, most difficult family of all. A child who learns that “families are like this, but they’re still family,” has a huge head start. That child will feel at home in the world.

Author Bio: LUCINDA NELSON DHAVAN first went to India on a Fulbright Foundation grant immediately after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College. She is still there. After several years devoted to domestic bliss, child rearing and learning Hindi, she joined the staff of a regional newspaper. She now feels she may have learned enough to write fiction, and is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.

Contact Lucinda at: ldhavan@yahoo.co.in