Family

Family is an interesting concept.  It brings both joy and sadness.  Happiness and Anger. Relief and Stress.  Some family is given to us and other family is chosen by us.  Regardless of origin, we all need some form of family in our lives.

I come from one of those families that don’t tend to keep in touch.  I lost my dad in my 20’s and I’ve never spoken to his side of the family since.  To be honest, I didn’t speak to his side of the family much before that.  My mother’s side is the only family I have known.  I have great aunts and uncles that have kept in touch with me over the years.  Mainly because one of those aunts took on the role of grandmother because I lost both of mine when I was still learning how to walk.  Even so I do have cousins on my mother’s side who have never spoken to me as adults.  So my given family currently consists of my mother, brother, four aunts and an uncle. Most of whom are 70 and above.  My mother and father had one of those whirlwind romances, the kind where you meet and within a few months you are married.  They were both only children.

My chosen family is a family that keeps growing, thankfully, and they are spread around the country.  Being as such, we don’t keep in touch like we used to, but I have a lot of soul friends out there.  We just pick back up where we left off even with years and multiple evolutions of ourselves between us.

Something I really need to work on is a local family.  People I can see and spend time with in the here and now.  I am so focused on getting out of where I am that I have stopped trying to cultivate new friendships locally.  Of course, many of the friendships I have cultivated here have already moved out of the area.  People think Los Angeles is transient, I say Memphis is transient mainly because people who move from up north or out west tend to leave quickly.  Actually, I have more friends still in Los Angeles, than those still in Memphis.

Family can also be tough when you believe opposite of each other which is my current boat.  My entire family is extremely conservative.  They all voted for Trump and are doing victory dances online and in real life.  I have always been the oddball out from day one.  I mean the entire family has birthdays within the span of a few months and I’m out there all my myself in the middle of the year.  Everyone in my family eats traditional southern cooking and I don’t eat meat or dairy.  I see everything different from those who I call family.  I’ve always been a part of my given family, but I never felt like I belonged to it.  And it has come to my attention that some of my extended family didn’t know what to do with me either.  Some of them would bite their tongue around me when I was a teenager because they didn’t want me thinking the worst of them.  This whole being together but separate happens in chosen family too.  I have friends that I connect with and have a great time with and trust and see many things the same as they do, but we also have some very big differences - mainly in how we each live our day to day lives.  I have a lot of friends that I would never do in a million years some of the things they have done.  I just wouldn’t.  Luckily this hasn’t caused any issues in our friendships.  They know who I am and I know who they are and we just roll on individually, but also, together.  Our shared values keep us connected, I guess.

Of course there is also the family we create with one other person, our life partner.  I don’t have one of those.  I haven’t even come close to having one, actually.  I think a large part of my life was just spent on other things.  I am interested though.  If anyone was going to come into my life for the rest of it, now would actually be a good time.  I am very concrete in who I am, what I believe about myself, and the world around me, and I know what I want in the other person.  Much of my life has been a constant shedding of identity and starting a new one, but I think the shedding is finally complete.  I have found me and so perhaps he can now find me too.

As we are getting closer to 2025, I am hopeful to expand my chosen family.  I want people in my corner who believe in me, appreciate me, and can help me better navigate life.  More on this next month….