It Runs in the Family
Read It Runs in the Family Online
Authors: Frida Berrigan
“
How to balance family, children, intimate partnership with urgent rescue of the gravely endangered planet? With wit, stark honesty, and deep compassion, Frida Berrigan suggests a simple answer, drawing on the bliss and grit of her own life as a mother—and as an activist. … This book matters enormously.”
—
JAMES CARROLL, AUTHOR OF
CHRIST ACTUALLY: THE SON OF GOD IN THE SECULAR AGE
“
I love Frida Berrigan’s voice—profound yet warm, gentle and fierce, deeply intelligent, authentic and charming. I wish this lovely, wise, and totally original book had been around when I was raising my child.”
—
ANNE LAMOTT, AUTHOR OF
HELP, THANKS, WOW: THREE ESSENTIAL PRAYERS
Here is a welcome antidote to the various parenting fads currently on offer from French moms and tiger moms and mean moms. Frida Berrigan, a mother and stepmother, wife and daughter, offers a unique perspective on parenting that derives from hard work, deep reflection, and lots of trial and error.
Parenting is hard. So is being a peacemaker in a violent world.
It Runs in the Family
is a book about how parents can create lasting and meaningful bulwarks between their kids and the violence endemic in our culture. It posits discipline without spanks or slaps or threats of violence, while considering how to raise thoughtful, compassionate, fearless young people committed to social and political change—without scaring, hectoring or scarring them with all the wrongs in the world.
© 2014 Frida Berrigan
Published by OR Books, New York and London
Visit our website at
www.orbooks.com
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.
First printing 2014
Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-939293-65-7 paperback
ISBN 978-1-939293-66-4 e-book
Text design by Bathcat Ltd. Typeset by CBIGS Group, Chennai, India.
Printed by BookMobile in the United States and CPI Books Ltd in the United Kingdom. The U.S. printed edition of this book comes on Forest Stewardship Council-certified, 30% recycled paper. The printer, BookMobile, is 100% wind-powered.
CONTENTS
Oof. Ouch. Ooh. The Pain and Empowerment of Birth
Home Sweet Home: Nonviolence Behind Closed Doors
Kids Will Be Kids: Gender, Sex, and Raising Good Children
It Doesn’t Have To Be A Material World
INTRODUCTION
C
an you be fully committed to changing the world and change diapers at the same time? Can you be a nonviolent revolutionary and a present, loving role model for your children? Can you hold the macro—justice and peace and the big issues of the day—in one hand and the micro—boppies, wipes, third-grade science projects, and playground politics—in the other? My parents did not think so, and did not plan on having children.
Father Philip Berrigan, a Josephite priest, and Sister Elizabeth McAlister of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, both peace and civil rights activists, met at a funeral in 1966. Each of them was fully committed to revolution inside the church and throughout society. They fell in love, married, and were excommunicated. They faced long jail sentences and long court proceedings, and endured the harsh burn of the media spotlight. They formed Jonah House, a new community to support and nurture lives of resistance and prayer and to replace the religious orders that failed to evolve with them. They did not see kids as part of that picture, but then I came along. My brother Jerry followed a year later, and seven years after that our sister Kate was born. So much for natural family planning.
It was not what my parents expected or planned, but it was all we knew. And it was pretty strange and kind of messy. There were ten adults and half that many kids, all living together in a tall skinny row house with a tiny yard in the middle of Baltimore. Our food was bought in bulk or salvaged from dumpsters and always shared with hundreds of hungry neighbors. The mice, cockroaches, and moths loved our abundant, haphazardly stored provisions. The calendar was chock-full of meetings, demonstrations, and arrests. In the bitter cold, driving rain, stultifying heat (and, occasionally, on a gorgeous, balmy spring day) we picketed the White House, vigiled the Pentagon, harangued the Department of Energy (which oversees U.S. nuclear weapons), and protested the Capitol. We spent a lot of time in court houses, too.
My mom and dad estimated that they spent eleven years of their twenty-nine-year marriage separated by prison. We celebrated birthdays, graduations, and other milestones in prison visiting rooms. A lot of our family communication happened through letters. But over the years, we built and maintained deep, loving relationships, even when separated by bars and chain-link fences, and across distances great and small.
In June of 2011, I married Patrick Sheehan-Gaumer. We have three kids and now that I have a family of my own, I really appreciate my parents. They set the bar so high. They were able to be peace activists, conscientious human beings, inspiring leaders, nonviolent revolutionaries…and good parents. They raised three complicated, thoughtful, driven people who are striving to lead meaningful, loving, integrated lives. I cannot replicate the circumstances of my upbringing—nor would I want to. But I have so much to learn from my parents about how to listen to the still small voice of conscience within amid the cacophony of children.
My husband grew up in the peace movement too. His parents, Rick Gaumer and Joanne Sheehan, are longtime activists. From an early age, Patrick and his sister Annie accompanied them to local anti-nuclear demonstrations, interminable War Resisters League meetings, and peace conferences and gatherings around the world. His parents were instrumental in forming low-income housing land trusts, intentional communities, and cooperatives for everything from babysitting to grocery shopping. Patrick grew up watching the grown-ups around him working together, building alternatives and addressing social ills.
My history and Patrick’s history were woven together long before either of us was even born. His dad hitchhiked to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to support my parents in 1972 when they (along with five others) were indicted and accused—with lots of politically charged hype and scaremongering—of planning to kidnap Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and blow up heating ducts in Washington, DC. There was no such plan. There had been a few discussions and a little research, but it did not take long for them to reject the idea as infeasible and inconsistent with nonviolence. The defendants were victims of J. Edgar Hoover’s paranoid overreach—which had FBI agents listening in on every late-night bull session and reading every love letter looking for evidence of criminal conspiracies. After long deliberation, the jury came back deadlocked and the charges were dropped.
Patrick’s mother, Joanne, was a member of the defense committees for a number of draft board raids. She and Rick were both arrested in front of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral with my uncle, Dan Berrigan, and others in 1975. And many members of Jonah House participated in nonviolence trainings that Joanne led and facilitated.
It was fate. Patrick and I were destined to lock eyes at a War Resisters League meeting while we were both dating other people, start running races together, fall in love, and get married in a peace movement wedding so joyful, cool, and iconoclastic that it was covered by the “Vows” column of the Sunday
New York Times
Styles Section—dubbed the “women’s sports page” by
Sex in the City’s
Carrie Bradshaw.
These days, my family seems pretty normal on the surface. We own our home and just the five of us live there: me, Patrick, and our three kids. Rosena is seven; she is Patrick’s daughter and splits her time between New London and her mom’s house. Our son Seamus is two, and we have a six-month-old baby, Madeline. We are a “countercultural” family. We live simply, we get by on Patrick’s salary, and are low-risk war tax resisters—meaning that we intentionally keep our salary too low for federal taxes. We don’t go off to demonstrations all the time, but I am active with the War Resisters League, an almost one-hundred-year-old, secular, pacifist movement based in New York that believes that war is a crime against humanity; and Witness Against Torture, an organization I helped found whose mission is to shut down Guantanamo; and we strive to be good neighbors, active members of our community, and the best parents possible.
In the pages that follow, I recount memories of my radical and countercultural upbringing at Jonah House, that strange and wonderful laboratory that made me into the woman, activist, wife, and mother I am today. I share snapshots and lessons gleaned from the day-to-day life of the Sheeberrigaumerans—the extra-long nickname Patrick and I gave our family. Here is a collection of essays on childbirth, parenting, family, and adapting to change. They speak to how life may get smaller and more domestic as children enter the picture, but hopefully no less insurrectionary and radical.
FAMILY
D
ad was born in 1923 and turned six years old two weeks before Black Tuesday in 1929. The youngest of six brothers, he watched his mother welcome the travelers who crowded the roads, looking for work far from their families. My dad’s own family was poor but they shared what they had. These early experiences of poverty, of seeing a nation unravel, of experiencing whole communities forced onto the open road, marked my father and informed his approach to life. I did not know my father as a priest. The old black-and-white photos of the handsome, well-dressed cleric do not fit neatly next to the grizzled housepainter and working man I knew as my father. But I did understand my dad as a person struggling to be faithful, as one whose deliberations were studded with Biblical insights.
My dad’s advice in every situation was drawn from his faith, which was a lived, applied, and practical discipline. His faith was never taken for granted. It was a tool he used, again and again, to carve hope out of despair, light out of darkness, community out of alienation.
In October of 1968 (six and a half years before I was born), my dad was on trial—along with eight others—for burning and pouring blood on the paperwork of war, the draft files that sent young men off to Vietnam. They were called the Catonsville Nine. He would be sentenced to three and a half years in jail.
This is what he told the judge:
From those in power we have met little understanding, much silence; much scorn and punishment. We have been accused of arrogance. But what of the fantastic arrogance of our leaders? What of their crimes against the people, the poor and powerless? Still no court will try them, no jail will receive them. They live in righteousness. They will die in honor. For them we have one message, for those in whose manicured hands the power of the land lies, we say to them: Lead us. Lead us in justice and there will be no need to break the law. Let the president do what his predecessors failed to do. Let him obey the rich less and the people more. Let him think less of the privileged and more of the poor. Less of America and more of the world. Let lawmakers, judges, and lawyers think less of the law, and more of justice; less of legal ritual, more of human rights. To our bishops and superiors we say: Learn something about the gospel and something about illegitimate power. When you do, you will liquidate your investments, take a house in the slums, or even join us in jail
… .
