FILLING IN FOR Family

When families fracture, surrogate grandparents can fulfill essential roles for love and support

- BY Lexi Pandell FROM WIRED

Karen Tautges Malinak watches her herd of 20 goats from the kitchen window as she waits for her family to arrive.

It's a clear summer day in Independence, Minnesota—population 3,644, half an hour outside Minneapolis—where she lives with her husband, Dave Malinak. She holds a pink coffee mug in her hands. “Moms make everything better,” it reads. Karen's life revolves around her farm, which is also the home base for her goat's milk soap business, Rapha Farms.

As we lean against her cluttered kitchen counter, Karen tucks her bobbed silver hair behind an ear and checks the time. “They should be here soon,” she says, her vowels drawn out by her native Minnesota accent. I'm due to meet each of Karen's four daughters, four sons-in-law and 12 grandchildren over the next two days.

Karen and Dave only recently moved to this farm. Because their workshop remains under construction, the soap-making happens wherever there's space. The living room is filled with racks of finished bars, labeled by scent: tea tree, lilac, lemongrass. Silicon molds cover a long table, and vats of essential oils line the walls. The small kitchen is stacked high with hand blenders. There is no room for furniture, hardly space to walk. Where, then, to put the family who will soon arrive?

As if on cue, Karen's daughter Michelle, along with her husband and two sons, pulls in. The boys, ages 9 and 7, hop out of the car and hand over gifts: a jigsaw puzzle for Dave and a handmade condolence card for Karen (as the day before, Karen had to put down Angel, her elderly Maltese).

Karen pins the card to her refrigerator, beneath a photo of three other grandsons—boys whom Michelle, her husband and her sons have never met. That's because Michelle and her brood aren't exactly Karen's real family. Karen “adopted” them as a surrogate grandmother in the lonely years after her biological daughters turned her away.