It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood

By Frida Berrigan

Parenting is hard. So is being a peacemaker in a violent world. It Runs in the Family is a book about how parents can create lasting and meaningful bulwarks between their kids and the violence endemic in our culture. It posits discipline without spanks or slaps or threats of violence, while considering how to raise thoughtful, compassionate, fearless young people committed to social and political change — without scaring, hectoring or scarring them with all the wrongs in the world.
Frida Berrigan is a mother and stepmother, wife and daughter. Her parents, Phil Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister, were a former priest and nun who became nationwide icons for their prophetic witness against war and nuclear weapons, which sometimes resulted in long jail sentences. Berrigan grew up in the community they helped found, Jonah House in Baltimore, and becoming a parent herself has forced her to come to terms with her own upbringing in new ways.
Expanding on the stories in her popular column for the website Waging Nonviolence, Berrigan has crafted a welcome antidote to the various parenting fads currently on offer from French moms and tiger moms and mean moms. She offers a unique perspective on parenting that derives from hard work, deep reflection, and lots of trial and error.

• Language: English
• Publisher: OR Books
• Release date: Jan 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781939293664

Frida Berrigan

Frida Berrigan lives in New London, CT, with her husband and three children. She is an urban farmer and community activist, organizing around affordable home ownership with the Southeastern Connecticut Community Land Trust, and against the ever-stretching shadow of militarism with the Connecticut Committee on Nuclear Prohibition. She writes periodically for WagingNonviolence.org, TomDispatch.com and In These Times, and is the author of the 2015 book It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised By Radicals And Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood.

Book preview

Nonviolence

INTRODUCTION

Can you be fully committed to changing the world and change diapers at the same time? Can you be a nonviolent revolutionary and a present, loving role model for your children? Can you hold the macro—justice and peace and the big issues of the day—in one hand and the micro—boppies, wipes, third-grade science projects, and playground politics—in the other? My parents did not think so, and did not plan on having children.

Father Philip Berrigan, a Josephite priest, and Sister Elizabeth McAlister of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, both peace and civil rights activists, met at a funeral in 1966. Each of them was fully committed to revolution inside the church and throughout society. They fell in love, married, and were excommunicated. They faced long jail sentences and long court proceedings, and endured the harsh burn of the media spotlight. They formed Jonah House, a new community to support and nurture lives of resistance and prayer and to replace the religious orders that failed to evolve with them. They did not see kids as part of that picture, but then I came along. My brother Jerry followed a year later, and seven years after that our sister Kate was born. So much for natural family planning.

It was not what my parents expected or planned, but it was all we knew. And it was pretty strange and kind of messy. There were ten adults and half that many kids, all living together in a tall skinny row house with a tiny yard in the middle of Baltimore. Our food was bought in bulk or salvaged from dumpsters and always shared with hundreds of hungry neighbors. The mice, cockroaches, and moths loved our abundant, haphazardly stored provisions. The calendar was chock-full of meetings, demonstrations, and arrests. In the bitter cold, driving rain, stultifying heat (and, occasionally, on a gorgeous, balmy spring day) we picketed the White House, vigiled the Pentagon, harangued the Department of Energy (which oversees U.S. nuclear weapons), and protested the Capitol. We spent a lot of time in court houses, too.

My mom and dad estimated that they spent eleven years of their twenty-nine-year marriage separated by prison. We celebrated birthdays, graduations, and other milestones in prison visiting rooms. A lot of our family communication happened through letters. But over the years, we built and maintained deep, loving relationships, even when separated by bars and chain-link fences, and across distances great and small.

In June of 2011, I married Patrick Sheehan-Gaumer. We have three kids and now that I have a family of my own, I really appreciate my parents. They set the bar so high. They were able to be peace activists, conscientious human beings, inspiring leaders, nonviolent revolutionaries…and good parents. They raised three complicated, thoughtful, driven people who are striving to lead meaningful, loving, integrated lives. I cannot replicate the circumstances of my upbringing—nor would I want to. But I have so much to learn from my parents about how to listen to the still small voice of conscience within amid the cacophony of children.

My husband grew up in the peace movement too. His parents, Rick Gaumer and Joanne Sheehan, are longtime activists. From an early age, Patrick and his sister Annie accompanied them to local anti-nuclear demonstrations, interminable War Resisters League meetings, and peace conferences and gatherings around the world. His parents were instrumental in forming low-income housing land trusts, intentional communities, and cooperatives for everything from babysitting to grocery shopping. Patrick grew up watching the grown-ups around him working together, building alternatives and addressing social ills.

My history and Patrick’s history were woven together long before either of us was even born. His dad hitchhiked to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to support my parents in 1972 when they (along with five others) were indicted and accused—with lots of politically charged hype and scaremongering—of planning to kidnap Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and blow up heating ducts in Washington, DC. There was no such plan. There had been a few discussions and a little research, but it did not take long for them to reject the idea as infeasible and inconsistent with nonviolence. The defendants were victims of J. Edgar Hoover’s paranoid overreach—which had FBI agents listening in on every late-night bull session and reading every love letter looking for evidence of criminal conspiracies. After long deliberation, the jury came back deadlocked and the charges were dropped.

Patrick’s mother, Joanne, was a member of the defense committees for a number of draft board raids. She and Rick were both arrested in front of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral with my uncle, Dan Berrigan, and others in 1975. And many members of Jonah House participated in nonviolence trainings that Joanne led and facilitated.

It was fate. Patrick and I were destined to lock eyes at a War Resisters League meeting while we were both dating other people, start running races together, fall in love, and get married in a peace movement wedding so joyful, cool, and iconoclastic that it was covered by the Vows column of the Sunday New York Times Styles Section—dubbed the women’s sports page by Sex in the City’s Carrie Bradshaw.

These days, my family seems pretty normal on the surface. We own our home and just the five of us live there: me, Patrick, and our three kids. Rosena is seven; she is Patrick’s daughter and splits her time between New London, Connecticut and her mom’s house. Our son Seamus is two, and we have a six-month-old baby, Madeline. We are a countercultural family. We live simply, we get by on Patrick’s salary, and are low-risk war tax resisters—meaning that we intentionally keep our salary too low for federal taxes. We don’t go off to demonstrations all the time, but I am active with the War Resisters League, an almost one-hundred-year-old, secular, pacifist movement based in New York that believes that war is a crime against humanity; and Witness Against Torture, an organization I helped found whose mission is to shut down Guantanamo; and we strive to be good neighbors, active members of our community, and the best parents possible.

In the pages that follow, I recount memories of my radical and countercultural upbringing at Jonah House, that strange and wonderful laboratory that made me into the woman, activist, wife, and mother I am today. I share snapshots and lessons gleaned from the day-to-day life of the Sheeberrigaumerans—the extra-long nickname Patrick and I gave our family. Here is a collection of essays on childbirth, parenting, family, and adapting to change. They speak to how life may get smaller and more domestic as children enter the picture, but hopefully no less insurrectionary and radical.

FAMILY

Dad was born in 1923 and turned six years old two weeks before Black Tuesday in 1929. The youngest of six brothers, he watched his mother welcome the travelers who crowded the roads, looking for work far from their families. My dad’s own family was poor but they shared what they had. These early experiences of poverty, of seeing a nation unravel, of experiencing whole communities forced onto the open road, marked my father and informed his approach to life. I did not know my father as a priest. The old black-and-white photos of the handsome, well-dressed cleric do not fit neatly next to the grizzled housepainter and working man I knew as my father. But I did understand my dad as a person struggling to be faithful, as one whose deliberations were studded with Biblical insights.

My dad’s advice in every situation was drawn from his faith, which was a lived, applied, and practical discipline. His faith was never taken for granted. It was a tool he used, again and again, to carve hope out of despair, light out of darkness, community out of alienation.

In October of 1968 (six and a half years before I was born), my dad was on trial—along with eight others—for burning and pouring blood on the paperwork of war, the draft files that sent young men off to Vietnam. They were called the Catonsville Nine. He would be sentenced to three and a half years in jail.

This is what he told the judge:

From those in power we have met little understanding, much silence; much scorn and punishment. We have been accused of arrogance. But what of the fantastic arrogance of our leaders? What of their crimes against the people, the poor and powerless? Still no court will try them, no jail will receive them. They live in righteousness. They will die in honor. For them we have one message, for those in whose manicured hands the power of the land lies, we say to them: Lead us. Lead us in justice and there will be no need to break the law. Let the president do what his predecessors failed to do. Let him obey the rich less and the people more. Let him think less of the privileged and more of the poor. Less of America and more of the world. Let lawmakers, judges, and lawyers think less of the law, and more of justice; less of legal ritual, more of human rights. To our bishops and superiors we say: Learn something about the gospel and something about illegitimate power. When you do, you will liquidate your investments, take a house in the slums, or even join us in jail… .

Again and again, throughout his life, in courts all over the country, my father stood resolute and righteous before power. He would accept the consequences of his actions without flinching. My brother and sister and I watched him walk into prison fearless and full of joy more times than we can count.

He was a fearless activist, but he was also a father who made fearsome oatmeal—flavorless hot muck designed to stick to your ribs. When it came to this particular abuse of power, my siblings and I played the impassioned activists and he was the heartless and impassive judge.

But, rather than be late for school, we ate the oatmeal and pulled our stocking hats low over our ears as instructed before leaving the house. He would watch us for two blocks to make sure the hats stayed on. Try telling the man who does not blink at a five-year prison sentence that only geeks wear winter hats.

My mom is fearless too. For instance, she’s always touching things in museums, in defiance of the signs prohibiting this. Otherwise enjoyable afternoons at the National Gallery or the American Visionary Art Museum have been marred by me hissing at my mom and pointing out the Do Not Touch signs.

Unfortunately, the same person who cuts through a military fence emblazoned with No Trespassing signs and festooned with barbed wire in order to disarm nuclear weapons delivery systems, forcing a confrontation with young military personnel authorized to use deadly force, is unlikely to be intimidated by Do Not Touch signs at museums watched by security guards in ill-fitting uniforms.

When my brother and I were little, we got our bikes stolen a lot. We were easy marks: white, pudgy, and well-meaning, living in a tall crowded row house full of other well-meaning people.

Hey shorty, lemme hold that bike. We would share, then the bike would be gone. We were always afraid to go home without our bikes because it meant getting into the car with mom and searching the neighborhood. We begged her to just buy us new bikes, but it never worked.

No matter how big and intimidating the boys who held our bikes were to us, they seemed small as they handed our bikes back to our mom after mutely enduring her condemnation. They might have mumbled or glared as she stowed the rusty old bikes in the back of the car, but they did it quietly and behind her back.

It was not just neighborhood kids who faced our mom’s fearsomeness. Once, demonstrating against war and nuclear proliferation at the White House, Mom held onto