| In her new book, Sophie Lucido Johnson defines “kin” as “the people in your life to whom you’re deeply bound through all things; and who are essential for your individual and collective survival.” It’s not a new concept: Indigenous peoples historically did not center a nuclear family unit, but instead had complex family structures. The same is true of Africans, who during chattel slavery forged kin groups as they were physically separated from their blood relatives. But today, it’s harder than ever to form these types of bonds. On a societal level, we’re encouraged to strive for “greatness”—but that greatness is individualistic and pits those who can produce the most against those who are the most vulnerable. With so many Americans struggling to get by, it can be nearly impossible to find time or energy to develop meaningful relationships that focus on our humanity, not our production. But, as Lucido Johnson lays out, it is still possible to forge kinship, and to do so, you must first identify your needs—and boundaries—in a way that allows you to say what you need and give of yourself to others without engaging in self-sabotage. It’s not easy, but I’ve learned that it is worth it. These relationships are life-sustaining, especially when you feel like you have nothing left to give.
I recently spoke with Lucido Johnson—an award-winning cartoonist, writer, and keeper of bees—about how kinship is vital to our survival and our children’s survival. We also discussed the similarities between bees and humans, why jealousy is useful, and the role of kin while living under a tyrant.
Regina Mahone: You open the book by explaining how the epidemic of loneliness we are facing is very much tied to myths around building nuclear families. You argue that it’s not just that we have to unlearn these concepts of the nuclear family, but that everyone should see themselves as their own nucleus. Can you talk more about that and why we need to center well-being over fundamentally flawed concepts like the nuclear family?
Sophie Lucido Johnson: The reason I am recentering the nucleus on the self is because the only way you can be in a loving and functional relationship is if you are not abusing yourself and if you know how to love and take care of yourself. There are so many analogies that work here…
RM: You use the analogy of a bee colony in the book. You write about how a bee colony consists of one queen, whose only job is to lay eggs, and her huge extended family that “divides up labor so that everyone has what they need and they can keep on building and growing and thriving and surviving.”
SLJ: Bees function more similarly to humans than many organisms do. There’s so much that is similar that it’s an appropriate comparison, really. We are wired the same in terms of how we work communally. It doesn’t work if you’re all by yourself in a little, tiny unit trying to do a million things. So I would say that taking care of yourself—which to me means being able to understand your own value systems, take the time to set boundaries where appropriate and available, and believe that your needs are important—we need that amount of self-work to be done in order for these systems to function.
One of the problems with the nuclear family is that it starts with two heads of the family [who are] pretty young. It’s supposed to start when you’re in your 20s, if you follow the model, and then you have two kids that you have to take care of. But you haven’t done the work yet of figuring out how to be a self-sustaining adult. You’re cutting off your support when you say, “I’m moving into a single-family home and having my 2.5 children.” And then you’re like, “Why isn’t this working?” The parts weren’t there in the first place. There was no way it was going to work.
RM: Building a network of deeply bonded relationships feels to me like the hardest part, especially when you already feel like you cannot take on one more thing. And then there’s the feelings of fear and jealousy that can surface when forming these relationships. I have not stopped thinking about the interview you mentioned that you had conducted with a woman whose friend group breastfed each other’s babies. I noticed my own feelings of jealousy while reading that part, though of course I would have loved more sleep and support when my kids were infants! Can you talk about the role that these feelings and perceived limitations play when it comes to building the structures we truly deserve to survive?
SLJ: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, jealousy is really useful. When I notice it coming up in myself, I’m like, “Ooh, OK.” It’s telling me about some need I don’t have met or some real deep desire that is close enough to being a need that is unmet, and I need to figure out what that is, because if it’s showing up here, it’s showing up in other parts of my life that I might not even be aware of. This turns up a lot in relationships, but it also shows up at work, and it shows up a lot with our kids. It’s not just, “I want the thing that person has.” It’s more like, “I need more than I have, and I don’t know how to get it.” I think the map that we get from jealousy is crucial.
The breastfeeding thing is super interesting because there are entire books about the history of breastfeeding and how women who had money didn’t use to breastfeed their own babies at all. And then the hard-won feminist rights issue of should we be given space to chest feed. There are so many complications that are rooted in race and class and history and family and gender, and that’s a fraught topic. But it gets at this question around possessiveness that I think is useful, and when there’s this feeling of, “oh, but that’s mine.” Where does that come from? And who is benefiting from that belief? It comes from widespread late-stage capitalism, which is about ownership and having more; more is equated with better. Capitalism is harming us as a species. The ends to which we’re wanting things for our individual selves [is] a death knell, because we need each other so badly, and this is a way that we cut ourselves off from one another.
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