Family

Family is more than shared last names and blood types and partial DNA. It's more than the obligations people often feel because of those shared things. My family has always been a hodge-podge of people that were more collected along the way than established at birth. I have some connection with a few biological relatives, certainly. But the people I have identified as my core family have been people my mother found, and brought into our lives. As the years have gone by since her death, and to some extent even before that, those people have drifted away. Ties have been severed, or simply come undone and haven't been re-knotted. And I am realizing that I don't have much to give my son in the way of family.

My husband has a family system that is made up of quite a few biological and step relations, and they are relatively tight, though a few people are more so than others. He has not lost all of his grandparents yet, and his parents and step-parents are still alive and in contact. His sister makes a great deal of effort to stay involved in his life, and is a strong presence for us. He has a daughter who is now 10 years old. He has family to offer. He comes to this marriage with ties that are not likely to be severed, and a support system that isn't likely to disappear. And I am incredibly grateful for that.

I don't have that system. Instead, I bring friends to the equation. Friends like Larry and Marjory, Aunt Pandy, Uncle JRod, Chris and Rachel; friends who will be a part of our lives for a very long time. Friends who have become family to me. I have a cousin, and my dad, too. They stay in touch, they visit, they support our life and our events. But the 'family' I have to offer my son resembles more and more the hodge-podge that my mother collected for me. And I vacillate between feeling guilty about that, and feeling proud of it. I loved the people my mother loved. And I grieve their absence. I grieve the loss of them. Maybe what I am worried about is one day losing the family I have made for him, and putting him through that same grief...we have already lost people along the way, even just since I was pregnant and he was born. He is too young to know it, but someday he will be aware of it when people are no longer a part of the fabric of his life.

I wish so much that my mother was still here. She would rally family members, she would mend the broken fences that needed it and burn the bridges that weren't going to be fixed, she would cast her net far and wide to make a family for my baby boy. And she would stake herself down in the middle of it all, and never walk away. All I can hope for is the ability to do the same thing, in my own way, for him.