Family

What does family mean to you? The actual word, family – what is it? Who is your family?

We don’t get to choose our biological families (and sometimes we are faced with the non-choice of blended families, as well). Hopefully everyone was blessed with a really amazing biological family – though my guess is that not everyone was. For the sake of the rest of this blog, I will not use the term “family” to represent our biological families exclusively (though they certainly can be included, if you wish).

When you graduated from high school and moved out/moved away/went to college/got a job/or/or/or, what did you notice about the dynamics of the “family” you began to create? What did family begin to look like for you?

One thing I have noticed over the years is that the family I have created in each place I’ve lived has shared meals together. It is clearly something that is important to me – a time to unwind from a busy/stressful/fun/awful/amazing day, talk about the goods and bads, make fun plans for our time off from work/school, throw food at each other (haha . . . only kidding . . . sort of). My greatest roommate (family) experience was in my last year of college. We ate breakfast together almost every morning (we typically ate dinner together, too). Granted, our schedules were nearly identical (same major + similar part time jobs), so we didn’t have to try too hard to make it to the breakfast/dinner table. Still, we were able to share great mornings together – check in, share our hopes for the day, make coffee, rush out the door, run back inside because we forgot our coffee, and off to work/school. These were wonderful mornings because we were able to build a relationship based on honesty and accountability – two essentials in any family of mine. We knew each other and went beyond the surface-level b.s. that shallow friendships are often consumed by. We created a family.

I know that, although my sister has chosen to stay at home and attend a (great) school near our parents’ house, she has also begun to create her little family. They do all sorts of things together, and I believe they have delved deeper than the b.s. as well. My point in mentioning that is to note how important this new family is, regardless of where you are geographically.

No matter what it looks like for you, creating this family is an essential part of being in this stage of life. I have learned a lot about what I appreciated from my childhood, as well as what will be important to me when I have children of my own. In the in-between, I’ll focus my time on friendly chats and food fights.