I met Michael Jackson in 1984. We were both guests of Quincy Jones and Steven Spielberg at Amblin, Spielberg's production company on the Universal film lot. Whoopi Goldberg was preparing to play Celie, the protagonist in the film version of The Color Purple, a book written by my mother, and was giving a private stand-up performance at Spielberg’s request.

Michael and I sat in the front row. He was wearing his by-then trademark red bandleader jacket with epaulets and gold rope loops at the shoulder, trim black slacks, white socks, black shoes, and yes, a glove. Whoopi was hilarious, and at one point singled me out for audience participation. She asked a few questions and pulled me onstage. I gamely played along, enjoying the attention.

Why Michael approached me in a room full of superstars after the show I will never know. Perhaps because I was the youngest in the room, and at 14 didn’t have a big name, a big career or a powerful company. I was a kid, easy, with few expectations. I was not old enough to demand, even silently, that he live up to anything. Perhaps he felt that with me he could be, in a sense, free.

I remember his body language. He moved slowly, like a very cool cat, hesitant, but smooth. And then, in the softest of voices, he asked how I was able to do the impromptu bit of comical business. He could never do something like that on the spot, he said. He’d be too nervous. I remember laughing and chiding him. You’d be great, Michael! I said. He shook his head and out crept a smile so open and vulnerable that I wanted to hug him, and probably would have, if he weren’t Michael Jackson.

But he was, and I had no way to reach across the boundary of celebrity that put us on opposite sides of an invisible fence. Michael was, as he described himself in a song years later, untouchable. I believe that is what killed him. A human being can only live so long without the touch of another and can only breathe manufactured air for so many minutes.

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Since we're still talking obsessively about Nadya Suleman, or "Octomom" as she's been called in the press, let's talk about non-traditional families and the way they are demonized in American popular culture.

Make no mistake, I wouldn't have fourteen kids. But if I did, I wouldn't deserve hyper-scrutiny, public ridicule, and a contant drone of judgment. Suleman wanted to have a lot of kids. Her reasons are complicated. Why is it anyone's business? Women have had fourteen kids and more for centuries. Women have chosen selective reduction and "killed" their fertilized eggs since IVF became viable. 

It's called the right to privacy. It's called the relationship between a woman and her doctor. If her doctor broke the law, fine. But the world is on fire. The alleged 1.3 million dollars American taxpayers will have to fork over to support Suleman and her brood is nothing compared to the twenty billion dollars American CEOs have stolen from the TARP bailout in incomprehensible bonuses. 

But Nadya Suleman is the new, collagen injected version of the "Welfare Mom." She's that single, lazy mom putting the squeeze on our shrinking wallets. She's an educated, but unstable and irresponsible "gold-digger."The state should hold her accountable, but Madoff, who bankrupted humanitarian organizations all over the world and is at least tangentially responsible for at least one suicide, isn't in jail.

Right.

I edited One Big Happy Family to support people who make nontraditional choices, whether to be a single mom or to give birth at home without a midwife. I edited it because traditional nuclear families end in divorce half the time, and often drive one or more members to Valium, infidelity, bankruptcy, or something far worse. Which is not to say nontraditional families are better than traditional families, but it is to say that all of us are trying to figure this family thing out, and people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. 

Unless we're talking supporting all families with health insurance, on-site childcare, healthy food, and affordable and high quality education, we should recognize pathologized mothers like Suleman as the whipping women they are. They are targets used to reinforce the normative of the heterosexual, married, upwardly mobile, and let's face it, usually white family that's disappearing before our very eyes with the erosion of the middle-class and looming impossibility of the American dream.

Truth be told, Nadya Suleman is taking one for the team. As long as we think she's crazy and irresponsible, we think we're perfectly sane. 

Today my guy told me about a bit Jon Stewart did on why Jews argue. Apparently, a "reporter" goes and asks a bunch of Jews why they argue all the time, and they start arguing about who should answer the question and whether Jews argue any more than anyone else.

We both cracked up because, well, I like to tend to argue and my son's father doesn't. I've been trying to stop and it's the hardest thing ever. Way harder than probability and statistics class in high school, and a quibillion times harder than the LSAT I took a few years months ago when I was thinking about going to law school. It's so hard that I've often wondered if I have a neurological tic that turns even the simplest request into a passionate, two-hour debate.

In the beginning of our relationship, I explained it was cultural. It's a Jewish thing, I told my mate-to-be. We have strong opinions about everything. You should see us at the dinner table, I said. No one agrees on anything--where we should sit, whether the lighting is too bright or too dim, if the food is overpriced or genius, if my sister should cut her hair. Our willingness to dig deep over trivial matters is a sign of commitment, I told him. It shows we care enough to engage at a deep level.

Arguing, I said. It's how we love.

To which he replied, I'm not Jewish and I don't like to argue because it raises my blood pressure and I want to have a calm, peaceful life. You can go out into the world and argue your a** off, but for God's sake, when you come home, can't we just get along?

Which, in my argumentative state of mind (tangentially related to Billy Joel's New York Jewish state of mind, btw) sounded like: Jews are crazy, can't you just be normal and not Jewish when you're at home? Which made me mumble something about him being anti-Semitic, which was awful, semiotically inaccurate, and the furthest thing from the truth.

But I was arguing. Who said I had to be rational? Terrible logic, I know. A truly heinous lapse. I'm still apologizing.

But back to Jon Stewart and laughing together about the pop cultural confirmation of what I've been saying all along. No, I wasn't bat mitzvahed. No I don't speak Yiddish or Hebrew. But yes, yes, I argue. So sue me. 

Ironically, it was a great moment. A love moment. A moment of acceptance. A cross-cultural moment. A moment of peace. A, dare I say it, family moment.

Today, gay marriage is legal in two states, and nine million Americans identify as multiracial. Almost half of all parents are unmarried. Two million children in America are adopted, 4 million are stepchildren, five million live with unauthorized immigrant families. And because America has the highest incarceration rate in the world—one in 100 Americans is in prison— two million children have parents in jail.

Women make up more than half of the American workforce, and the number of stay at home fathers, or “househusbands,” is steadily rising. Americans travel more than almost any other population in the world, and are also more obese, infertile, and Internet savvy.

For these reasons and more, the face of America’s families is almost unrecognizable compared to thirty years ago. Today, a dad ushers a mom out the door (or onto the laptop) and then purees pesticide-free food to feed their half-Mexican child, who was conceived in a doctor’s office and carried by a surrogate—living in India. A mother leaves her daughter with friends to board a midnight bus to a high security prison eighty miles away, where she’ll spend forty-eight hours with her husband--in a trailer designed for conjugal visits. On the way, she creates a spreadsheet on her laptop for a multi-national human resource firm that wires her wages directly into her bank account--from a branch in Korea.

And as I write this, our nation appears to be coming to grips with our unhealthy relationship with oil. Researchers predict that within the next three decades, suburbia will be thrown into chaos as a result of inevitable shortages. McMansion living may morph into off-the-grid habitation for the masses; family rooms once filled with flat-screens and marble and glass furniture will be grow houses, not for drugs, but tomatoes, carrots, and spinach.

CHANGE is everywhere, my friends. It's in our house and the White House. It's pounding on our front door, demanding we adapt, or be left irretrievably behind. We've gone from what color is your parachute to how creative is your adaptation.

Well? 

Rebecca Walker, author of One Big Happy Family, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

Rebecca Walker, author of One Big Happy Family, is guest blogging this week as one of Jewcy's Lit Klatsch bloggers. Walker's book is a collection of essays about how the American traditional nuclear family has changed.

It's late and the littlest one in my house is sleeping in my bed with the bedside lamp on, and five inches from his face. What my son calls his "favorite artist" is on eternal repeat on the Bose iPod thingy, and I have the distinct feeling that if I have to hear Ayub Ogada sing Kothbiro one more time, I will lose my mind.

As I pull the covers down, I see that not only is my four year old sleeping in my bed, but his Diego underpants have not been replaced with Pull-Ups! And he's sleeping with not one, but six of the little plastic people from his Automoblox cars under the pillow.

A discussion between my inner attachment parent and my inner pro-individuation parent begins. Should I put him in his own bed? Wake him up to put on a Pull-Up even though he probably won't need it? Then I remember I have more important things to worry about, like whether my biological son is going to have a relationship with my non-biological son, even though they may not meet until they are both adults.  

Oy.

One day I realized I was living in a totally new kind of family, and I wasn't alone. My baby's father is fifteen years older than me, and I have a non-biological sixteen year old I raised with my ex-girlfriend. My best guy friend is married to a guy and they've adopted a daughter from China. Another close friend has a husband and a girlfriend. Which is why I decided to ask eighteen writers to write about all the wacky, genius, technologically sophisticated ways they make family. 

But today as I was thinking about the new book, I thought about all the pieces I didn't include because they were just a little shy of normal on my dial. Like the piece about the American medical student who married a woman he met in the Amazon who still doesn't speak English--fifteen years later. (He doesn't speak her native tongue, either.) And the story about the mom who made every member of her extended family members vote on whether her newborn should be circumcized.

What's the difference between a new, groovy family configuration and one that's problematic? I mean, it's pretty newfangled to have eight babies via IVF, and I absolutely think Bill, Nikki, Margene, and Barb should marry Anna on Big Love, but where do we draw the line? Should we draw one at all? 

As Carrie Bradshaw might ask: 

When is one big happy family just one big dysfunctional mess, and how do you know the difference?

Rebecca Walker, author of One Big Happy Family, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she'll be here all week. Stay tuned.