Functional multiplicity is not about making plurality disappear. For our family, it means staying connected enough to live, work, contribute, and find one another again when we become scattered. On Jude’s Day, we took the Treehouse with us—and discovered what becomes possible when all nine of us have something to bring.
Tag Archives: dissociation
They Call It Functional Multiplicity. We Call It Saturday.
Functional multiplicity sounds formidable. In our family, it has been built through something much smaller: waffles and cheese sandwiches, somatic signals, laughter, fear, repair, prayer, and learning how nine people can inhabit one life without requiring anyone to disappear. This is what an ordinary Saturday looks like from inside the Treehouse.
The Work Inside an Ordinary Saturday
What does functional multiplicity actually look like in ordinary life? This companion analysis looks beneath one difficult Saturday to explore the small practices—communication, co-regulation, somatic signaling, shared agency, attention, repair, and delight—that help a plural family build a life together.
What Bedtime Looks Like
What does bedtime actually look like in a plural family/system? At the end of an extraordinarily difficult Hope’s Day, Dad discovers what his sons have been carrying, what they need to leave behind, and why bedtime isn’t simply how we finish the day—it is part of how we make the next one possible.
Midday Analysis: Justus’s Day — A Companion to “Three Warm Towels”
What does protection look like when something really does happen? A midday analysis of Justus’s Day, and a companion piece to “Three Warm Towels,” examining protection, accountability, truth, trauma, caregiving, and the family’s movement from emergency back toward ordinary life.
The Little Boy Who Told the Truth
When the world asked what comes next, seven-year-old Solis answered in the language of trauma and anger. This is a story about exploitation, employment, freedom, and the little boy who once told the truth—and needed Daddy to hear him again.
Solis’s Day Is Reclaiming the Sabbath
We stayed home on Sunday because we needed rest. By midday, the journal—and the analysis that followed it—was uncovering something much older about urgency, safety, work, faith, independence, and what it means to reclaim the Sabbath.
Sometimes You Run Out of Glue
Sometimes what looks unfinished is finished. Sometimes what emerges from the fire is more truthful than what we intended to make. And sometimes the next step in rebuilding a life begins with knowing when to stop, look at what is already here, and let God turn the page.
One Little Thing
Some problems arrive so large that we disappear inside them. On Hope’s Day, an insurance envelope, memories of architecture, a lesson from Mom, and a Bruce Springsteen song taught us something different: one little thing. Then another. Hope is not knowing how everything will turn out. Hope is learning how to remain here while we find out.
The Crater and the Tree
A seven-year-old set a boundary. A difficult conversation crossed it. In the aftermath, our family looks at the crater without allowing it to become the whole landscape—and asks what children need in order to remain safe, free, and fully alive.
