You can choose your friends but you’re stuck with your relatives. That’s the saying according to my father. I think it says a lot, beyond the obvious. “Stuck with your relatives”. Why use the word ‘relatives’ and not ‘family’? I know there’s a version (that may even be the original version) that uses ‘family’, but I think using ‘relatives’ makes it so much more accurate. For relatives share blood with you. Mother, father, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles… you are connected to them through blood; that cannot be denied. Hence the ’stuck with your relatives’.

Does that make a family? Being connected by blood to them?

It can’t–or rather, it can’t be the only thing. Blood can’t be all. If it was that simple, if blood was everything, there wouldn’t be parents abusing their kids, people turning away relatives in times of need, the stories that populate Dear Abby about people wanting to sever contact with ‘relative John’ because of ‘reason’… these are not families, merely fragments of what never was, what could never be.

For love was missing. Love is what turns a group of people related by mere biology into families.

The couples who foster and/or adopt children, who for one reason or another have been left alone… they have no blood link with these children. But they have love for them, so much love. And in time, the children and couples become families, as love works its influence. Fragments become whole under the Bond of the Heart. The Bond of the Heart is not restricted to just that example; it can occur between two friends, or two strangers meeting by chance… for love does not choose whom to love, just that it does.

There is a third bond. Some would say it can make up for the lack of the other two, in some cases. I am not so sure that it can make up for the lack of the Heart Bond. With this bond, no boundaries exist–they do not matter. Gender, race, religion, culture, sexuality, blood, beliefs… all these boundaries are transcended by the Bond of Spirit, the one thing that truly links one human being to another.

A family bonded by the Heart and/or Spirit–irregardless of blood–has featured a lot in my stories. I believe in what I’ve said here; it is a culmination of things I have read and talked about, in trying to understand this. I believe in family: I’ve seen them, I’ve been in them and I still am.

This is a rewrite of a post that I made elsewhere on Friday, March 25th, 2005

This entry was posted by Alex Collins on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 5:42 PM and is filed under Themes, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.