I wonder what stone soup tastes like.

At first, I was excited about reading “Stone Soup” because I thought it was the children’s story about a traveler who makes stone soup then shares it with the villagers who shared their vegetables. I was a bit disappointed when that wasn’t the case. Instead, it was about families and how we perceive the “best” or “perfect” family.

Kingsolver talks about how people strive for the “Family of Dolls” with Dad, Mom, Sis, and Junior, and even though people have their own definition of what family is, the Family of Dolls is still in the back of their minds. When I read this, I automatically thought of the American Dream and how people try to achieve that dream. In the American Dream, the happy family consists of a breadwinner dad, a stay-at-home mom, two kids, and a dog named Spot. Not everyone has, or is fortunate enough to have, this exact replica of the “perfect family”; stuff happens.

I think that the definition of a “broken home” or the “perfect family” varies among people. People strictly following the Family of Dolls may consider a family with divorced parents as broken. Others may think otherwise. To me, as long as the members in the family are overall happy and get along with each other, that is all that really matters, no matter what the family consists of.

I have friends with divorced parents who have both remarried. Even though their parents were divorced, they seemed very happy. Growing up, I’m not going to lie, I was a little jealous that they had two homes and that they had multiple sets of grandparents. I would not consider their families as “broken”.

Another example is my family. When my family moved to Alaska from the Philippines, my dad was not able to come with us. For most of my childhood, my mom, with the help of my grandparents and other family members, was the one who raised my brothers and me. Even though my dad wasn’t physically with us, we were able to speak to him through phone calls and received letters for every single holiday. My family and I are really close and, for the majority of the time, happy. From the outside looking in, my family might seem like a broken family, but I beg to differ.

In the end, Kingsolver did compare families to the actually stone soup story. She states, “Any family is a big empty pot…Each stew turns out different.” I agree with this. There are different types of stews out there in the world; some taste amazing, others not so much. How good the stew is depends on the person eating the soup, similar to how the definition of family varies from person to person. Just because my stew isn’t the same as someone else’s, it doesn’t mean that mine does not taste as good as theirs.