A Traditional Unit That Comes in Many Different Forms

I just had to ask Anndee Hochman: Did dating our friend Barry push you over the edge?

The question was a joke--lame and probably insensitive. But in an odd way, it cuts to a fundamental issue.

My wife, Pam, and I and our three children are spending the summer touring the United States, reporting on the state of the American family. After almost three months on the road, Alaska, our last stop, is drawing near. And, like the salmon leaping in the rivers we pass, the most basic questions finally are breaking the calm surface of our inquiry:

* How to define family.

* Whom to include in the definition.

* What to do about those who fall short of our standards.

Hochman has written a book advocating nontraditional family arrangements. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is among those organizations that have dug in their heels in support of traditional patriarchal families. Our itinerary juxtaposed these apparent opposites, so the Book of Mormon and Hochman’s book collided.

Four days before hitting Portland, we drove our RV into Salt Lake City and strolled downtown. A purple and pink sunset tinted the modern skyline and the looming mountains like God’s own stained glass. Gesturing skyward, I yelped to my children: “Look! Look!” It no longer struck me as odd that Brigham Young declared this desert basin to be the prophesied Zion.

I’d been to Utah before in my single, scruffy days--to ski, to bum around--and each time I’d felt like a misfit. I’d sensed disapproval at every turn. I toured Temple Square with my family this time, and Pam and I felt as if we basked in a glow of welcome and acceptance.

We sat in the Tabernacle and traced what we could find of our genealogy at the church’s Family Search Center. The highlight for the kids, though, was the church’s officially sanctioned, super big-screen 70-millimeter film, “Legacy,” a moving story of the Latter-day Saints’ migration after facing violent persecution in Missouri and Illinois.

Romanticized and sanitized (there’s no mention of the church’s early support of polygamy, for instance), the movie is nevertheless a gritty portrayal of pioneer life, a tale of faith, family and determination--told, interestingly, from a woman’s perspective.

*

The role of family in the church is unique, at least in part because Mormons believe that marriage and family are eternal, beginning with a person’s “premortal” state and continuing forever in the hereafter.

As the 20th century has unfolded, though, Mormon families have faced some of the same forces fraying families nationwide. Early on, the church took the lead in attempting to counter familial disintegration.

In 1964, the church president issued an admonition that probably tweaked consciences of every faith: “No other success can compensate for failure in the home.” In 1970, the church created Family Home Evening, a prescribed time of prayer and togetherness away from outside influences. And soon thereafter, the church began broadcasting its award-winning TV and radio ads, low-key nudges to take family matters seriously.

Today, the church is among the fastest-growing religions, and I suspect its campaign in support of strong families is one reason why. But, like other conservative religious groups, it remains concerned with the continued unraveling of traditional families.

In 1995, the president, a prophet according to church doctrine, issued a “Proclamation to the World” on the family. It leaves no room for gender bending, hanky-panky or the switching of traditional roles.

My family’s final stop in Salt Lake was at the office of Richard G. Scott, one of the faith’s 12 Apostles. Scott, a father of seven, greeted us warmly. Pam and the kids chatted with him awhile about our trip. Then they ducked out, and I pressed him on the church’s rigid stand concerning gender roles, which is at the heart of the great family debate rocking society.

Scott did not give ground: “A woman and a man have different basic characteristics. They form a wondrous whole when they are combined,” he said. And a man and woman uniting in marriage and raising children is the never-altering essence of God’s plan.

There, perhaps inevitably, the conversation looped from the abstract back to the personal. Praising my children, Scott went on: “I’m sure that your dream for them is an emulation of your own pattern of life with Pam--have a home, be loyal to each other. You strengthen your children so they’ll have those same ideals.”

Indeed, Pam has stayed home since Robert was born because she decided that raising our children was more important than her work as a public health nurse or the fulfillment she got from that career.

But we chose our traditional family arrangement on our own, not because of religious dictates. We are not as certain as Scott about where to draw other lines--or what we would do if our children decided to cross them.

Which is one reason we raced along the Columbia River to make a dinner engagement with Anndee Hochman and her mate, Elissa Goldberg.

Hochman’s book, “everyday acts and small subversions” (the Eighth Mountain Press, 1994), bears the sort of subtitle that spurred Latter-day Saints and other conservative Christian groups to circle the wagons of tradition: “Women Reinventing Family, Community and Home.”

Still, we couldn’t help but note certain similarities between the Latter-day Saints we’d met and these Jewish lesbians.

Like Elder Scott, Anndee and Elissa greeted my family with warmth. Since it was Friday night, they asked us to join them in observing the Sabbath, the traditional Jewish holy day that is not dissimilar to Family Home Evening--a time to shut out the world, to tighten loving bonds.

With our kids on a window seat, Anndee and Elissa lit candles, poured wine into an ornate kiddush cup, passed the homemade challah bread and sang prayers in Hebrew. There was only one break with tradition, Anndee said: “We changed the God-language to the feminine.”

In many ways, Anndee is a traditional gal. She grew up in a progressive Jewish neighborhood in Philadelphia, graduated from Yale, shoved off on a journalism career, then turned to social work. Along the way, she dated men, including our mutual friend Barry.

But no, she said--after pointing out that my question was, indeed, in poor taste--her relationship with my pal had nothing to do with her drift to lesbianism.

Rather, she said, a realization had been building for years. She did not, in other words, simply switch to lesbianism on a whim, as some people imagine.

But when she knew she didn’t fit the standard gender mold, a reevaluation of her place in society was at hand. In her book’s introduction, she describes reading her way through the feminist canon. One influential book argued that “sexism was the basis for all the world’s oppressions and condemned the nuclear family as its training camp.” Hochman never fully bought that idea. But she did resent the ways society pressured her to conform.

Her book, she said, was a way to investigate--and applaud--the new types of families being forged by people shunned or ignored by the mainstream: lesbian couples, single straight women, older mothers, etc.

*

As my kids played with Elissa on the floor of the couple’s living room, I asked Anndee if she is planning to have children.

“We’re talking about it very seriously. Leaning toward yes. Elissa would get pregnant. She’d very much like to do that, and that would be fine with me.”

Has she considered those who say it is critical for a child to have both a mother and a father?

“What I believe about kids,” she answered, “is that they really need loving adult attention. . . . It’s the quality of the attention, not the gender.”

In other ways, though, her views are rather conservative. For example, she and Elissa say that if they do have a child, it will be extremely important that they buck contemporary trends and stay together.

“We’re unusual,” Anndee said, “in that we both have parents who are not only still together, but together happily and joyfully. I think we both had strong, happy role models in that.”

I had asked Scott what he would do if his daughter told him she were lesbian. To counter church teachings, he said, is a prescription for unhappiness, because the teachings show people how to fit into God’s plan.

A lesbian daughter could not remain in the church, he said. “But,” he added, his gentle voice softening even more, “I would try to help her understand all my life that she is loved and accepted as a daughter.”

Hochman is hopeful that, over time, some of those who reject nontraditional families will come around. Her own parents and grandparents came to accept and love Elissa as they got to know her. And as lesbian couples move next door to traditional families, Hochman said, greater tolerance will blossom there too.

Hochman has said that if she and Elissa have a child, they will move back to her progressive Jewish community in Philadelphia.

“Not to Salt Lake City?” I ask.

She smiles and shakes her head.

Still, I imagine that Elder Scott and Anndee and Elissa would make fine neighbors. They seldom would agree. Often they’d fight. But I suspect that when things got tough they’d help each other out. Because regardless of their own definitions of family, they’re all still part of the American family, and that’s how the American family works.

ON THE WEB: Visit the Sipchens on the World Wide Web at https:// www.latimes.com/trip/ for maps, journals and sounds from the family’s trip.