"Family goes beyond blood"

[nandm]

Family goes beyond blood.

Holiday dinners, birthdays, graduations, quiet times of just being together...I come from a large, close-nit family. So when I married a miliatry man and moved a thousand miles from home the day after our wedding, many people warned me that I was in for a whopping case of homesickness and loneliness.

They were right---but not in the way I had expected. I was lonely. I was desperately craving the comfort (and the comfortableness) of my family. But most of all, I was simply longing for people who knew who I was, who I had been, and who I had the potential to be. It caught me off guard, this keenly acute sense of bieng misplaced and forgotten. Sure, we knew many people, but everyone was in constant motion. In the military, I missed the feeling of permanence.

Then one night, something happened. One of my new friends showed up on our doorstep after a house fire, with nothing but her infant son and the clothes on her back. (she wasn't even wearing shoes.) While her husband slavaged what he could from their home, we made tea and dug through boxes of baby clothes.

Once everyone was settled for the night, I had the chance to sit down and take in everything that had just happened. I thought about how under different circumstances the woman in my guest room would have gone to her family, but instead she came to me. She chose our home because she knew she would be safe and accepted. We did not share a single gene, but we did share ourselves. On that night a new family was born. This new family blossomed slowly, not like the instant and seismic love of a parent for a child, but a gently and shy recognition of my own feelings reflected back at me from another soul.

That one night with her allowed me to open myself to the families-in-waiting that had been there all along. The neighbors who brought me dinner after we moved into a new house; the woman who took my child to school when I had the flu; the friends who let me just be me. All of the quiet, simple things that I treasured so much in my family were found in the people that I had chosen to be my friends.

It has been years since that night, but the lesson is one I cherish: She chose us to be her family, and in that instant, we were.

By Aimee Langan
From the Book
50 Truths Worth Knowing

To each of us the word family means something different, it brings up different feelings, throughts, and emotions. I feel I am fortunate to have learned that family is much more than those I share genes with, it is a bond, a connection, a feeling, a thought, that ties us to another human being. In that way I consider all those here at SR to be a part of my family. Thank you for being part of my life.

[indigo]

I completely agree and want to say thanks for this thread.

indie

[Digginit]

Thanks for that.

Peace~
dig