Buddhism, Anxiety and the Modern Family

If you think you’re so enlightened, go spend a week with your family.

— Ram Dass

With the holidays coming up I have to point out that there is one particularly lovely and stressful community each of us participates in from the moment we are born: our family. Unlike your religious community, your book club, or your friend group, you don’t (at least initially) get to pick which family you participate in. You’re born into it and that one is yours until the moment you die. Some of us couldn’t imagine not speaking with our family every week, while others are far removed from engaging them. The extent to which we want to interact with our family, and how we define it, is up to each of us, but it’s something we can’t really avoid participating in, one way or another.

The television show Modern Family depicts the antics of one large family which consists of a number of iterations: the grandfather/father (who is on his second marriage and has a stepson and a son in that second marriage), a daughter (who is part of the stereotypical “nuclear family” as she is married to a man and they have three children together), and a son (who is married to another man and has adopted a child).

The basic premise of the show (and my long-winded explanation of it) proves how these days family is what we make of it; it’s not about who came out of whose vagina. It’s more fluid than that. The etiquette expert Millicent Fenwick, way back in 1948, defined the word household as “a unit, a group of…