All in the Family

A few weekends ago I was feeling particularly blue, alone in a hotel room in Brasilia, Brazil’s sterile capital. Bored, I called my grandmother and laid out my weekend plans: Netflix and apartment hunting. This wouldn’t do, my grandmother said, as she hung up the phone. “You need to see people.”

A few hours later, I found myself in an SUV, as a family of five I'd never met before toured me around Brasilia for six and a half hours. They pointed out the best pizza places, their favorite monuments and the mall where everyone commits suicide. When their year-old baby needed a dipper change, it happened in the trunk of the car.  When their teenage daughter remembered she had to study for a math test the next day, her dad told her it would have to wait. Nothing could detract from their task to keep me away from my lonely hotel room as long as possible.

My connection to this family was precarious. The father was my grandmother’s childhood best friend’s son. That mouthful of a flimsy link was enough for these strangers to adopt me for the day.

Brazilians are never alone. I first caught wind of this at 16, while traveling on my own for the first time in my life. I was walking past the Louvre in Paris, when an elderly woman pounced on me. Between squeals and kisses, she introduced herself as my grandfather’s cousin, who had lived in Paris for the last two decades. For the next six weeks, she took to the ballet at the magnificent Opera Garnier, negotiated curfews with my crazy host family, and introduced me to French food and wine.

My French aunt and I at my wedding last year.

This flexible notion of family serves Brazilians well. Physiologists have shown that daily community interactions, especially those involving people with whom we share strong ties, are integral to happiness. While I’m skeptical of national happiness survey, it is remarkable that Brazil consistently tops developing countries as having the happiest people. 

In the United States, where scattered families are the norm and “successful” children leave the nest at 18, there have been several attempts at recreating the sense of belonging that families once provided. These span the spectrum from luxury buildings with planned game nights and shared gyms to intentional living communities, where everything from cooking to raising children is a joint task.

To be sure, living with family is not always easy. Close ties often come with a daily dose of opinions and criticism spared those living far away.

Still, the hardest part of moving to the United States was missing out on this connection with my extended family. Growing up in Sao Paulo, my weekends were booked. Every Saturday and Sunday, barring a major medical emergency, we would travel for three hours to my grandmother’s house. There, in a podunk town in southern Brazil, I would spend all day playing with my cousins in the pool, summersaulting from my uncle’s shoulders into the water. I knew the smell of my great grandmother’s favorite mints, how my cousin liked her eggs, and my uncle’s McDonald’s order by heart. All that knowledge evaporated when we moved and our weekly visits were replaced with sporadic trips every other year, or whenever we had the money.

The memory of that intimacy pulled me back to Brazil.  I wanted to know my family again, to participate in the daily moments that make up a life. So, a few weeks after moving back, when my uncle invited us all for a weekend on his farm, I immediately said yes.

I was amazed to find identical trees as far as the eye could see, sprouting out of the same purple earth that drew my family to this region decades ago, first for sugar cane, then cotton, now rubber.

A dozen of us gathered in the farmhouse, sleeping in bunk beds at night and hammocks during the day, with little to do but talk to each other. We lounged around discussing names for my cousin’s baby, due in a few months.  I learned that my grandmother hates sweets and that my grandfather’s hands look exactly like my father’s. The same shallow nails and stubby fingers interlaced mine.

Our quiet weekend was interrupted when my uncle invited the entire town and two priests to consecrate a chapel he built on the farm. Brazilian farms and plantations traditionally have a small church, where laborers and families can worship.

Grass was still being laid around the chapel when the guests arrived. Eighty people from the local town and all the people who built the chapel packed in for a catholic mass. My aunt and uncle dressed the altar in white lace and placed a statue of the Virgin Mary neatly on the wall. The priests blessed the giant wooden doors and prayed that anyone walking through them would find themselves home.