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Family Legacies My sister and I were raised that even though you are so angry at each other and you want to do something mean, you are still family. You’re still connected, and we’re still there for each other. So it was basically when someone needs help you are there to help them because you are family. This quotation underscored the importance of families sticking together despite difficulties within family ties. In most instances, positive family legacies fell into one of the recurring patterns as participants portrayed their families as hardworking, caring, and cohesive. Negative Legacies Unlike positive legacies which were thematically similar, negative legacies were idiosyncratic (i.e., those reported in each individual interview). In other words, participants had little difficulty portraying their family positively as a hard working group of people who stuck together and willingly helped others as these legacies reflected Midwestern’ cultural values and views of family. However, we were unable to identify thematic patterns among the negative family legacies, we suspect in part because negative family legacies do not fit with a Midwestern’ view of the family, thereby constraining the participant’s identification of negative family legacies. Further, participants may have wanted to save face with the interviewers, and thus tried to avoid portraying their families and themselves negatively. In multiple instances, participants were unable to identify negative family legacies: I: One of the things that I’ve noticed is that you just have a list of positive legacies that you’ve constructed but you don’t have a list of negative legacies. Why is that? P: Well, as I thought and thought about the different stories that my family tells and the different principles that are taught and modeled by my family….sure bad things have happened and we have had some bad stories, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they are principles that are embraced by my family. Like we had this one vacation where it was like Murphy’s law…everything that could happen…that could go wrong….went wrong. But we kind of just took it and griped about it at the time but 16
Family Legacies it’s not a legacy…it’s not something that we look back on and say, “Well yeah, every time we take a vacation the worse thing is going to happen.” This interaction demonstrates the participants’ reluctance or struggle to identify negative family legacies. Even when participants were able to identify negative legacies, they often displayed much difficulty coming up with family stories to illustrate them. While we could not discern distinct themes in the negative legacies, a set of idiosyncratic negative legacies were evident. These included things such as curses about moving from location to location and other more trivial characteristics such as the family being loud or messy eaters. One participant who identified a negative family legacy, “Smiths are messy eaters,” shared a story about her family eating cherry jello: “Someone had just dug in and thrown it on their plate and missed it and it stained right away…we christened the dining room table once again.” Although less flattering than the positive legacies, this negative legacy still served to identify the family. Other negative legacies were more consequential such as those that had communication at their core, including how the family ineffectively dealt with conflict or problems, being anti- social, and having family “policies” such as “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Each of these family legacies potentially constrained the daily interaction of the emerging adult who reported the negative legacy. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” legacy implied an even higher level of constraint on individual identity, preventing the family member from openly discussing his/her sexual preference within the family. Individuals tried to put a positive spin on some negative legacies by indicating how these legacies helped individual family members. Thus, participants reported that negative legacies served positive functions in several instances, representing one way to address the cultural constraints imposed on portraying one’s family in a negative fashion. The following participant identified a negative legacy that served a positive function: 17
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