Bound by Blood…defining My Family

Family…it’s not always about blood. Family is about the people that get into your heart and soul. They’re the ones that you turn to whenever you’re happy or sad. The ones that make you laugh and smile. Family are the people that you would lay down your very life to protect. The ones that you go to with perfect honesty because to you they will always be honestly perfect. Even when you disagree. Even when you hurt each other because that’s what family does too sometimes… Your family, the people that you love more than you love even yourself, those people may not always carry your blood but if they’re truly your family then they will always carry your HEART and you must never let them doubt your love.

I come from a family that by any means or definition would be considered…unconventional and broken. My parents were married for twenty seven years before divorcing around the time I turned seventeen. Abusive father, struggling mother who did everything she could to make sure that my sister and I still felt loved and were protected as best as we could be. It didn’t take me long to realize and learn that sometimes it’s not blood that ties people together. My mother has always been my hero. My rock and my adviser. My guide and my guardian. It is only in recent years that I have been able to begin to repay her by turning the tables and trying to provide for her like she did for me throughout all those dark years of her marriage and the following years of hardship as she struggled to raise two girls after her divorce. I have my daughter who is my very heart and soul. The light in my life and the reason that I live and breathe. She is my greatest achievement and the greatest gift that I have ever been given. I look at her every day and thank whatever god or deity it was that blessed me with her because, to me, she IS the greatest and most pure form of myself and continuation of my blood that I could ever imagine existing. 

I have one sister who is my blood. Older than myself by six years, we are night and day. Light and Dark. My mother’s child and our father’s. Though we share the same blood there have been many, many times throughout the years when it has felt as though we were the farthest thing from related. My “second sister” I was blessed enough to meet as a freshman in high school. We came face to face for the first time in gym class and by that afternoon it was as if our futures were cemented. Over fifteen years later and we are STILL the best of friends. We are closer than what I am with even my blood sister and I cannot imagine the hell my life would be without my second sister there to listen, love, and guide me whenever I need her.