Why the obsession with traditional families?

I'm going to get political about some single ladies. Like my Grandma Logue.

Single lady Grandma Logue was at least as tough as Beyonce is.

I don’t like to cover politics much in this newsletter, because it’s just covered to death. Which brings me to what people in personal finance call the Big Ds of family finances: death, divorce, and disability. There’s a political and social media movement to glorify “traditional” families, with stay-at-home mothers and breadwinning fathers, but this doesn’t work for a lot of people. Even people who would prefer traditional gender roles can and do get hit with death, divorce, and disability every single day.

My Grandfather Logue was older than my grandmother when they got married. They had three kids, each about six years apart, with my father as the youngest. The day after Christmas in 1949, my grandfather died of a heart attack. He was 64. My father was 11.

My grandmother was armed with an eighth-grade education and a Railroad Retirement survivors check. To take care of herself and my father, she hustled: she took in sewing and mending, cleaned a church rectory, and babysat lots of children. She made it work, but it was not easy.

Yet, there is no doubt in my mind that she and my father were better off together than my father would have been in foster care simply so that he could have two-a parent family.

My grandmother was wicked sharp, but she lived in an era when women of her social class were not encouraged to get an education. And even if she had gone to high school or college, she was a single mother at a time when employment discrimination against women was rampant. That’s unfortunate. If she had been able to get an education and had been working at a time when women were paid fairly, I expect that Kitty Logue would have been a formidable trial lawyer. Woe to anyone who crossed her path!

Grandma Logue

Instead, she was a shrewd but tired woman who worked very hard, liked to play bingo, and made people cinnamon rolls instead of buying Christmas or birthday presents. And trust me, you would rather have her cinnamon rolls than any toy in the Sears catalogue.

Her nine grandchildren are all college graduates. They own businesses, run government agencies, and served with distinction in the US Navy. We’re an impressive bunch, if I do say so myself.

And also, we have had to deal with varying degrees of death, divorce, and disability. Because, guess what? These things happen, every day, in every family.

The solution isn’t denying that bad things happen and sending everyone to follow #tradwives on TikTok. Instead, we as a society need to invest in education, create workplaces that rewards people based on how hard they work and not what they look like, and give people something of a safety net when bad things happen.

I would prefer that politicians deal with reality rather than chase an ideal that maybe held for some middle-class white families between 1950 and 1960, but not my father’s family.

What do you think? You can disagree, but keep it classy.