I don\u2019t know what a perfect first-century family looked like, but I\u2019m certain that Joseph and Mary didn\u2019t fit the ideal. Joseph had no money. He had no safe place for his wife to give birth and no plausible explanation for her pregnancy. How scared they must have been. Their family was turned upside down before it even began.<\/p>\n
I know about unusual families. I come from one. There is a picture in one of my mother\u2019s photo albums of the day she and my stepfather were married. They are holding hands and looking pleased but also totally overwhelmed. Each had lost a spouse to cancer only 18 months before. Their kids are on either side of them\u201d\u201dsix teenagers with mouths stuffed full of braces, heads full of regrettable \u201980s hair, each one of them with a dead look in his or her eyes. When I look at that picture and see my biological sister, my adopted sister, three step-siblings whom I didn\u2019t know, my stepfather, my mother and me, I don\u2019t see an ideal family. I see something quite unusual.<\/p>\n