Isolation vs. Interconnectedness with Family Theme Analysis

In “Living Home of a Future God,” the narrator and protagonist, Cedar, must contact her birth mother for the first time because she is pregnant and needs information about genetic diseases that may run in the family. While initially Cedar seems to view her pregnancy as an opportunity to build a better future for herself and her unborn child, completely divorced from her family’s past, over the course of the story she seems to open to integrating her estranged adoptive and birth families into her life in new ways. Importantly, Cedar’s birth family is indigenous, and so reconnecting with her family isn’t just about restoring individual relationships, but rather about connecting with an entire cultural and ethnic lineage that she hasn’t recognized. Through demonstrating the tension between Cedar’s desire to start her new family from scratch and her obligation to engage with her birth family for the sake of her unborn child, Erdrich illustrates the necessity of living interconnectedly with one’s family.

At the beginning of the story, Cedar’s view of herself and of the life she will provide for her child is very future-oriented, isolated both from her family and from her past. Her adoptive parents are “alienated” from her, and she’s “never answered” the single letter her birth mom sent her, demonstrating Cedar’s desire to build a future that does not engage with her past. Immediately, readers notice that the story is written in second person, as Cedar is addressing her unborn child. This is an important choice, in part because it shows that the narrator is almost entirely oriented towards the future. She frames the present moment in the context of a life that hasn’t even begun yet, rather than in the context of events and relationships from the past. In the first paragraph, Cedar boldly thinks, “I’ll be a good mother even though I’ve fucked up everything so far.” Here, she doesn’t acknowledge how exactly she’s “fucked up,” and assumes she’ll be able to build future without engaging with the mistakes and challenges of the past.

Cedar is not the only one in the story who has isolated herself from her family. Cedar explains, “I was removed from my Potts mother because of our mutual addiction to a substance she loved more than me.” In giving up her daughter for adoption, Mary Potts Almost Senior interrupted the family lineage—a rupture that would have been permanent were it not for Cedar’s pregnancy. In addition, Cedar’s adoptive parents, Sera and Alan Songmaker, have also isolated themselves from their pasts. They both come from wealthy parents—“legendary robber barons who scalped the Minnesota earth of ancient forests.” Sera and Alan’s left-leaning politics lead them to be ashamed of their family wealth, and so they donate much of their inheritance to charitable “causes now defunct,” extricating themselves from their families’ politics and the wealth they accrued through shady means. Both of these cases represent people who have broken from the legacies of their families, and consequently seem to have started anew with each generation.

While Cedar at first resists acknowledging a connection to her birth family, she slowly begins to embrace them. Cedar originally sees her trip to visit her birth mother as only an obligation she has to protect the health of her child. She is resentful and resistant to acknowledging any connection she has to her birth mother. When Mary Potts Almost Senior tells Cedar that she looks like her, Cedar responds instantly that she “[does] not.” Her resistance to admitting that she looks like her mother reflects her desire to maintain the ruptured family lineage and her disconnection from her birth family. Over the course of the visit, though, Cedar slowly warms to the family. The first hint of this warming is when she thinks that she’s glad she didn’t have “this mother and this family, except maybe this grandmother.” It is significant that Cedar’s favorite member of the family is the grandmother, the oldest person, as it suggests that Cedar is beginning to value the past rather than orient herself only toward the future.

Towards the end of the story, Cedar’s engagement with her family shifts from an obligatory, one-time visit to a deeper emotional engagement. When Cedar’s adoptive parents arrive, invited by her birth mother, Cedar feels she is in the middle of “some sort of vertex” and “[goes] dizzy.” Her negative reaction to having to confront her past both with her adoptive and birth family is to flee, but the only place to go is into her younger sister’s room. In this moment, Erdrich demonstrates that engaging with family and recognizing interconnection is inescapable, no matter how much Cedar may want to avoid this obligation. The room into which Cedar escapes belongs to her younger sister, Little Mary, and is extraordinarily messy. Earlier in the story, Little Mary asked Cedar to help her clean it, but Cedar thought the mess was too much to handle. However, upon this second instance, Cedar resolves to help her sister clean up. This moment is important because it represents a shift in Cedar’s relationship with her family. She could have just taken refuge in Little Mary’s room without helping to clean, but her willingness to help out represents Cedar opening herself up to having a deeper relationship with her family, and an acknowledgement of their interconnectedness. Digging through the junk in Little Mary’s room also serves as a metaphor for Cedar’s willingness to dig through her past and understand her relationships to family. Even though it’s messy, she is willing to face the challenges of acknowledging relationships with family.

Over the course of the story, Cedar transforms from a woman who has little interest in connecting with her family to someone who is beginning to open to connecting with family in meaningful ways. By highlighting the ways in which Cedar develops towards a more integrated, interconnected understanding of family, Erdrich demonstrates, without sentimentality, not only the value but also the inevitability of family relationships.