824: Family Meeting

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.

Ira Glass

Bryan LeBaron is dad of a big family, seven kids in all. He mostly grew up in the United States, but his father and most of his family is Mexican. And he moved back there a few years ago.

Back in November, he gathered everybody together for a family meeting outside on a patio. Most of the kids were in a long bench, holding pillows.

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Lexie is Lexie Harrison-Cripps, the journalist that recorded this meeting. Because she knew what some of the kids did not know-- that Bryan was planning to run for a seat in Mexico's House of Representatives.

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Not just ready for the campaign, which is months away, but he's called his family meeting right now, in November, because something's come up that's not only going to affect his candidacy but everyone in the family in the next few days. What's happened is that Macario, their 17-year-old, has just made a big, public declaration on Instagram, telling the world that he's gay, which in some places would be, like, whatever.

But this family is Mormon, living in a tight-knit fundamentalist community in Mexico. Macario and the other kids go to a fundamentalist Mormon school that very much disapproves of homosexuality. Bryan figured kids at school might start saying cruel and hateful stuff to Macario and his brothers and sisters. Already, some classmates were posting pretty awful comments on Instagram. Bryan wanted all of his children to be prepared.

Ira Glass

Three of the kids listening to this are young. There's nine-year-old Ahriella, seven-year-old Chanel, and four-year-old Franco. And what that means is that before Bryan can tell them "your brother is gay," he first has to explain "gay," the whole idea of gayness, to these little kids.

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Good guess, he tells them--

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--and then launches into his explanation. He keeps it simple.

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It's yes all around.

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On to the big reveal.

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I should say that two years ago, this is not how Bryan would have talked about being gay. He was raised to believe that it was a choice and sinful. When Macario came out to him, Macario explained that he had already tried to pray and fast his way out of being gay, and it was impossible.

And Bryan believed him. He changed how he saw all of it. And as he talks about Macario with the family, Macario is sitting exactly in between his two little sisters as they learn what "gay" means. He smiles, like a mystery contestant on an old-timey game show whose secret identity was just revealed.

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This, of course, is Macario. He says it felt good to hear his dad say all these things in front of everybody. Next, Bryan explained to the little ones in the family the kids in school might be pretty mean about Macario, and we'll need to be ready.

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Macario tells them about some of the mean things that kids have said at school. There was this one kid.

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So everybody's on the same page, all prepared. Macario is feeling great about it.

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And when they go to school after this prep, none of the things that Bryan prepared them for happened. The school made a rule that nobody could talk about Macario. Overall, most of the Mormon community continued to treat Macario like they always had.

All this was a little sad for nine-year-old Ahriella, who marched into school ready to tussle, to defend her beloved brother after the family meeting.

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In fact, some teenagers set off a pretty frightening array of firecrackers at their house and threw rocks wrapped in pieces of paper with Macario's name written on them, which was scary. Kids and adults posted comments online, like "Macario should find a tall tree and a rope, should die." Bryan and his wife Lindi took all the kids out of the Mormon school.

But the family had been prepped. They understood that people might get mad about Macario. And inside the family, the family meeting set the tone. It was a preemptive strike that made Macario's gayness a non-issue, a non-negotiable fact.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our program, the power of a family meeting to drop some news-- like your brother's gay-- or the classic one people remember, I guess-- we're getting a divorce. And then there are the administrative family meetings where parents announce some changes in how we do the dishes around here or take out the garbage or whatever, and everybody's going to be doing their fair share.

What a family meeting can and cannot accomplish, especially in families where the kids do not want to go with the parents' plan, that's our show today. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act 1-- A Slow Decision Process That's Mostly But Maybe Not Completely Over. Sometimes when there's a family decision, the family can keep talking about it for months, on and off-- in the car, at meals, whenever-- with everybody weighing in with different points of view. Over the last few months, I've been talking to the parents in one family like that. Back when I first chatted with them in December, I asked the dad in the family how often the topic comes up.

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This is Lotan Pinyan. What he's talking about with his wife Michal is, where are they going to live next? They're a youngish couple in Israel with three kids-- 9, 11, and 13 at the time of this conversation. Both educators, he's head of development, building a school and a campus for Bedouins, nomadic Arab tribes. And Michal--

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Lotan is, perhaps you can tell, somebody who's always quick to speak his mind, sure of what he thinks. Michal's more deliberative. They used to live in a kibbutz in Israel, Kibbutz Be'eri on the border with Gaza. When Hamas crossed that border on October 7, like so many families, they hid in the safe room in their house.

Dozens of their neighbors were killed, more at Be'eri than at any kibbutz that day-- 1 in 10 people, including Michal's parents. And when it was over, they and most everyone else from the kibbutz were relocated to a tourist hotel by the Dead Sea, an hour-and-a-half drive from their old home in the Gaza border.

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Discussions about where they're all going to live next. In December when we first talked, it was just two months after the attack. And each family had to decide, would they stay with the community? Would they ever want to return to the kibbutz where they'd just gone through this traumatic assault?

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Lots of people, especially the older people, were sure they wanted to go back and rebuild. People with kids were all over the place. And leaving a kibbutz, quitting kibbutz life, is a big deal. A kibbutz is a special kind of tight-knit community.

Kibbutzim were originally set up as collective farms on socialist principles, and Be'eri is still run on the old-school socialist ideals most kibbutzim in Israel have abandoned. For example, as a member of the kibbutz, you turn over every cent that you earn at your job, your entire paycheck, to the collective.

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And that means everything. They give you a house to live in, cars to drive, full health care, a gym and a swimming pool, and a dining hall, if you don't want to cook, and spending money for necessities but also for fun stuff like family vacations, to cover your kids' school and college. Children spend all day every day with other kids their age. It's a great way to raise kids. They can roam around. Michal describes what's so nice about kibbutz life this way.

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Michal grew up this way on this kibbutz and loved it. Lotan moved to Be'eri with her when they first got together. He chafed at some of the rules at first, but got used to life in this big extended family. Now, after October 7, here he was with all of them at this hotel, figuring out what to do next.

Ira Glass

Michal and Lotan were in one hotel room. The three kids were cooped up in another, getting on each other's nerves and into each other's hair. It's hard to be a family in that scattered situation.

It was hard to supervise the kids. They were gone all day at work. Michal now had a 90-minute commute each way to and from her job. There was school for the kids, but it was a makeshift thing the kibbutz organized, not real school.

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After just a few weeks of this, Lotan started to think, this is not good for our children. Maybe we need to get out of here, leave the hotel, leave our friends and family behind.

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Michal was not into this idea at all, of moving away from the hotel, from the other kibbutz members.

So they had to decide if they would move out of the hotel. But there was a bigger question they were going to have to face someday. Should they move back to their kibbutz near the Gaza border? Like, ever?

At this point, it's unclear how long the war will drag on. Over 1,600 Israelis have died, according to the Israeli military, and over 29,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Other kibbutzniks-- kibbutz members-- told me that they would only move back if somehow there were peace at the border.

Or, you know, some conceivable path to some peace plan that would seem fair for the Palestinians so the kibbutzniks wouldn't have to worry about future attacks coming across the border, which, in a practical way, probably means they won't be moving back any time soon. Michal and Lotan try to imagine what it would take for them to return.

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For decades, safe rooms have been required in all new Israeli homes, reinforced to withstand rocket attacks. Soon, Michal and Lotan see on the kibbutz WhatsApp group that attackers have made it inside the kibbutz. But they assume it's small, maybe 5 or 10 fighters, and they assume the army will be there soon.

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We should explain that the safe rooms are designed for missiles coming in, not for people coming in trying to break into the safe room, so they don't lock from the inside.

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Michal's brother Yuval talked to their mom then.

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The last messages on WhatsApp have Michal and her brothers saying, "Mom, keep writing all the time. What's happening with you? Mom, answer." Their mom says, "Dad was shot, and they're throwing grenades. They blew up the safe room."

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Lotan says at this point they realized they needed to do anything they could think of to keep their kids alive.

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They-- Hamas fighters-- seemed like they were using the storage space downstairs as a small base, keeping weapons there. The family heard explosions and gunfire. The youngest, the boy again, is nine years old.

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And they waited, from the morning all through the afternoon and into the night, trying not to make any noise at all. They had no food, no water. If someone had to pee, they did it in a wastebasket while everybody looked away. They were there for 19 hours with their kids.

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Finally, the army came at midnight and rescued them. When they got to the hotel the next day, of course the kids couldn't just shake this off. Their son, the nine-year-old, had had a full day of whispering in the safe room.

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So could they ever go back and live at Be'eri? Two or three weeks after the attack, Michal went home again, the first time, to the kibbutz to see what it was like.

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Other people I talked to who returned to their kibbutzim told me that walking into their homes was like everything was frozen from when they ran out, like it was still October 7. One woman said she felt like she was watching herself in a movie. She felt so distanced from it. One man told me he tries to go back once a week to try to absorb what's happened.

Ira Glass

So she went back to the hotel. Where they still had to decide, where would they live right now? Should they leave the hotel and set out on their own in the short run?

By early November, Lotan definitely wanted to leave. Michal did not. And then she saw how badly their oldest daughter, Aya, was doing. Again, Aya's 13. And in the weeks after October 7, she was the person in the family struggling the most.

She was skipping school every day and tried to hide it from them. She just stayed in her room all day, doing nothing. This was completely unlike her, Michal says.

Before October 7, she loved going to school, went happily, never missed a day. She was an athlete, came home from volleyball at 7:00 three nights a week. At night, she would hang with her friends. She was busy.

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Seeing Aya like this, that's what convinced Michal that Lotan was right. They needed to get away from the hotel. Their kids needed that. But where to go?

Now, as they were talking about this as a couple, members of the kibbutz were in a much bigger conversation about leaving the hotel as a group. There was so much damage to their kibbutz, so many homes and buildings set on fire, burned to the ground, bombed, hit with grenades and bullets. It would take two or three years to rebuild before they could move back.

So they were looking at temporary places that the whole group could relocate to while that happened. Lotan was one of the kibbutz leaders figuring out where they should go. The choice came down to two locations, and Lotan had decided that wanted to go to a peaceful village called Kedma.

The idea is, everybody could move there and heal, figure out in a few years whether they will move back to Be'eri or not. The vote was November 22. Lotan's side lost by 40 votes. And the place the kibbutz chose-- in Hatzerim, near a big airbase-- that was a place that he and Michal did not want to live.

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And that decided it. They were not going to stay with the kibbutz. They'd strike out on their own. So they talked to their kids about this plan.

Aya hated it. She didn't want to speak with me for this story, but her parents say she was angry. One thing she still had from her old life was her friends, who had just gone through this trauma together-- were still going through it, in a way.

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Their two other kids were good with the idea of them leaving the hotel. The littlest told them, we can live in a car as long as we're together. It's fine. But with Aya, she came back to it over and over.

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Michal explained to Aya that since they really might never move back to Be'eri, it didn't make sense to move to the temporary location with her friends right now and then split with them in three years and start over again. Easier to leave now, at an age when she can make new friends. She told Aya that she would drive her back to see her old friends any time she wants. But there are certain things she didn't say to Aya.

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That conversation was in January. They were still in the hotel. The plan was to move February 1 to a house near a city called Kiryat Gat, maybe a half-hour drive from the border. And it's at this point the family got a lucky break-- something they didn't expect.

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Maybe, Michal said, she finally understands that things are going back to normal and she's going to have to go to school like normal with other kids who are moving on.

As move-in day approached, feelings in the family were all over the place. Aya was up and down-- a lot of down.

They moved February 1, and I called one last time a few weeks after that. The kids are in their new schools. The family's renting a house. Lotan and Michal are bracing for what it's going to be like to have their paychecks paid to them directly and living the way you and I do, where we have to worry about money and paying bills.

But one thing that was different in this last call was that they both seemed way more certain that they're never going to move back to Be'eri. There's a possibility, sure, but they both said it's likely they'll never return. Aya, meanwhile, is mad all the time. It's very severe, Michal told me, worse than before.

She asks all the time to be driven back to the hotel to see her friends. She's gone back once a week. Michal feels like this is one of these parenting choices where she and Lotan made the right call to get the family away from the hotel and start a new life. But that doesn't make it feel any better. She told me she hopes that someday Aya will understand and even forgive them for it.

Coming up, if you want to inspire your family at a family meeting once a week every single week, after a while, how do you come up with anything original to say? That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, "Family Meeting," the stories of people who care about each other, or are supposed to care about each other, coming together to figure stuff out. And of course, these sort of meetings happen in non-family settings also.

I personally find it revolting when any boss refers to his employees as family, but I acknowledge there is an entire workplace version of this. And of course, there's a whole tradition of this in sports-- high school sports teams, where the coach sits everybody down for the big "come to Jesus" talk about how things have been going and what needs to happen next.

One of our producers, Chris Benderev, was looking around at the stuff that high school coaches say to teams before their big games. He found a lot of "let's get out there and crush them." Also a lot of the underdog version of that-- "nobody believes in us, but I believe in us." And then he ran across this one speech where the coach tried a different approach. Kind of striking.

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This is in a locker room in Southlake, Texas. The team is the Cedar High School High Longhorns. Their coach, Joey McGuire. They're in the playoffs. If they lose this game, season's over. The team is ready to go out onto the field.

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Smart, right? Win, and we get one more week together. Our producer, Chris, wondered if this was a move that the coach uses a lot, so he called up Coach McGuire, who said, yes, he has said this before in other playoffs. But he says it's also a thing he feels.

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These are Texas high school teams working their way up to a state championship. Longhorns were playing the Carroll High School Dragons. Coach McGuire says that he knew that if they lost that game they were about to play, it really does feel like something. When you lose at the end of the season, that group of people, you're never going to play together again.

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So the team went out there in front of all those people. And how'd it go?

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Actually, it was a little worse than that-- 37-33. He says in the locker room afterward, it was really hard. But even if you win the state championship, which he has, that's hard, too.

Because that's the end. No more weeks together. Even if they win, there's that loss. He says he always makes it a point to thank the seniors, because it's often hardest for the seniors, you know, leaving the family.

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Act Two, Sealed With a Diss. So sometimes the reason for a family meeting is a conflict that a kid is having at school. And then the parent has to decide, did my kid do something wrong or is the problem the other kid?

In this next story, the parents have definitely come down on one side of that one. The story unfolds in a series of letters between two moms. It's an excerpt of a short story by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, read first by actors Eisa Davis and Erika Alexander.

(SUBJECT) EISA DAVIS AS LUCINDA: Tuesday, October 1, 1991. Hello, Monica. I'm sure you remember me from the class field trip to the Getty in September. It has been brought to my attention that your daughter Fatima may have started a nasty rumor about my Christinia. I hope to clear this up, as we both know how ugly these things can get.

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Actors Erika Alexander and Eisa Davis reading an excerpt of "Belles Lettres," with Alvin Melathe reading Principal Lee. The story's by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. You can read the full story in her book of short stories, Heads of the Colored People.

Ira Glass

The program was produced today by Sean Cole and Bim Adewunmi. People who put together today's program include Michael Comite, Aviva DeKornfeld, Bethel Habte, Cassie Howley, Rudy Lee, Seth Lind, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Safiyah Riddle, Ryan Rumery, Alissa Shipp, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to the entire LeBaron family, Eloy Bleifuss, Madeline Ticknor, PJ Mark, Heath Vanden Bosch, and kusports.com for video of Coach McGuire's speech. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks as always to our program's confounder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he was just cast in a local theater production of Annie? In the title role! So he actually adlibbed his way through a lot of the show, including Annie's biggest and most famous song, which he delivered as--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.