Family

So what is Family? Lots of people are talking about this, the conservative right, the liberal left, my friends, my coworkers, my parents, cousins.

When I was a kid and people asked me about my Family I talked about my parents, my siblings, and maybe my aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents. Family was about some sort of blood connection, or marriage to some blood connection. Friends were separate entities and did not count as Family.

In high school I expanded that definition to include other people, not related by blood, who I considered Family - neighbors who were as parents to me, and their children who were as siblings. I was able to make this extension as a teen based on simple concepts of authority: I got in trouble with Mrs. B and she made me do some chores as punishment. Mrs. M treated me as an older responsible daughter. I interacted with the other kids as if they were my siblings - teasing, taunting, including and excluding them from activities like my own sisters and brother. So Family was about relationships, and in my youth Family relationships were about power and authority.

After college, and after a huge falling out with my own parents, I embraced a different concept of Family - a Chosen Family. Included were people who I loved and who loved me. People I would laugh with, fight with, and occasionally cry with. People I would travel to strange places with, people to whom I would trust my life, whether at the end of a rope, in a financial arrangement, or in some other threatening situation. Family to me became about trust and love, and not so much about power and authority and blood.

Years ago I met a beautiful person and fell ass over teakettle in love. We built a life together, bought a house, planned on children. We married in front of our Family, all definitions of Family. It was a time when our relationship and marriage was not always welcome, and I fought internal and external forces telling me that my Love was not part of my Family. We both struggled against these forces and finally arrived at a point where the people in our world, our Families, by blood and love, all saw our union as one of Family, and we were incorporated into each other's Families as well as any other.

Last year when people asked me about my Family I responded by talking about my wife and my new daughter. Though there might be raised eyebrows at this, there have been very few pointed comments to me that my child is not my child because I did not birth her. In our community there are many permutations of the child-parent family scenario. Biological kids, adopted kids, step kids, foster kids. One parent, two parents, three or four parents. All fall into the definition of Family, and for the first time I was able to expand my experience of Family to include being a parent.

This year I am experiencing another shift in my experience of Family, though not necessarily my definition. As I face the not so distant reality of living by myself, my daughter with me only part of the time, I feel a giant gaping hole opening up. I expected my Family to be myself, my wife, our kid, and possibly more kids. This will not be the case. Where I have experienced 40 years of expanding my Family, of expanding my capacity to love and be loved, I have only experienced this kind of loss at the death of a Family member, and never has it been so great, so huge, so terrifying as it is now. To compound the gaping hole there are legal questions at hand: is my kid really my kid? Given that I did not birth her, the second parent adoption process has stalled, and even with my name listed on her Cambridge, MA birth certificate, I am legally her mother? There are emotional questions at hand, too, questions I never thought contained an iota of valid logic, now rearing up like dementors to suck the happiness out of me.

As I face these questions and hurdles I ask myself, who is in my Family? My soon-to-be ex will always be in my Family, and that would be true even if we never had a child together. My daughter, the child of my soul, of my heart, of my sweat and tears if not of my blood, she will always be Family. Perhaps there will be others to come. Other friends not yet met who will become Family. Other Loves. Other children. So in the agonizing face of the contraction of the daily presence of my immediate Family, I can only know that my Family will, eventually, in time, expand again.