Meeting the Family

I have been called a family person and a homemaker. I have to admit that I am all right with both of those titles. My family is very important to me and I am a family person. Because of that, my family is very involved in my life. Many of my friends at university cannot understand why my parents know so much about my life or why I want it is important for me to let them know about the relationships in my life. I don't have a specific answer for that, but it really is important for me.


Yesterday I brought my boyfriend to meet my family. He had already met my parents, but he got to meet my aunt, uncle, two cousins and part of my aunt's family. I'm not sure which part of that scared me the most. The fact that he is now involved in my family, or the fact that he fits right in! I have never had anyone in my life fit in that well with my family.

Meeting the family seems to be a rite of passage in North American society now. Given how disconnected families are now, this has lost much of the importance that it used to hold. It still is something that is a passage for relationships, whether it is mostly reserved for the serious points of relationships like marriage or right from the beginning. Some of us choose to have our families involved in our relationships and others choose to limit the involvement of our families in our personal affairs. It's a different meaning for all of us how we define our families and how we choose to accept them.

When I began to think more deeply about the idea of meeting family, it also touches on the idea of how we create family. Right now, sitting in the living room with the people I live with, I would invite many people to come and meet my family. There are two wonderful people who love life more than anything else who were born with Downs' Syndrome. There's an autistic woman who will bend your ear with talk of airplanes and big long skinny balloons for hours if you let her. There is the wise man who brings a sense of peace and calm to me life largely because I have to slow down a lot to listen to him. His body may be failing, but his mind is sharper than ever. There is a man who has a huge smile on his face when someone new comes through the door and can be very difficult to understand some days. There's a woman who travelled very far from her family to become part of this one and continues to learn a new language. There's a man who is changing his life right now, journeying in step with this family and bringing life and laughter wherever he goes. Our fearless leader is French Canadian and has boundless amounts of energy. This is one of the families in my life and one of the most important.

Genetics have a role in how we determine our family. Some of us allow that to set the boundaries of how we determine our family. If that was the only way we could find family, many of us would have gotten a rough deal out of that. Family is not who shares your DNA. Family are the ones who care at the end of the day, who want to be a part of the major events in your life and the little ones. They want to share the joys and the sorrows and know that each are equally important. Family holds you when you need to be held and then pushes you out the door so that you can fly.

In making the man in my life meet the family in my life, I realized something. I have more family than I ever thought I had. And I've gotten really lucky with them.