Friends and Family

This week, my brother and his wife, my dear sister-in-law of 36 years, came to visit.  It has been some time since I have seen them since they live 1600 miles away, and, even though we speak regularly on the phone, and I visit them on Facebook and via pictures, they are, as am I, older than the picture we carry in our minds eye.  Now, Greg looks like a cross between my mother's brothers and my Dad.  I seem them all in his beloved face.  I look at Joyce and see the blushing bride from her wedding day, and the dear and much loved friend whose house I would walk to when cabin fever struck because I knew she would always be happy to see me.  I love my sister in law.  I love my brother.  They are my family, along with my two sisters, and my husband and children, grandchildren, neices and nephews.  They are the family that share my blood and my DNA, and share my life.

I am also a woman who is blessed with friends.  I have old friends with whom I have remained in contact since the Third Grade, middle school and high school.  That is no small feat when one considers that due to my father's job in sales, I started a new school almost every single year, all over the midwest and southeastern United States. 

I have some wonderful, cherished friends that I have met online, and come to know in real life who are absolutely integral to my day.  They are people whose opinion I value, sometimes more than anyone else's.  I turn to them for advice, for support, for ideas and for a kick in the pants.  I love these women.  There is no question that they are my true and dearly loved friends.

I have friends who I know that if I pick up the phone, even after a long, long time, they will be delighted to hear my voice and will pick up the conversation exactly where we left it.  There is no recrimination, no apology, no expectations except that they love me and I love them just as we are.  We enjoy our private jokes that never get old, our stories that ever get retold and our friendship that is old and valued.

I am a very fortunate woman.  I know that.  I know that there are people who go through life and have no close friends and recently read where friendship is something of a lost art in the United States.  I am not so sure that is true.  But, I think that it is possible, and that may be because we have tried to blur the lines between friendship and family. 

My family is my family.  My Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, brother, sisters, children, grandparents, grandchildren, all my family is my family. Some of them are my friends, too, but they are ALWAYS my family.  We share much more than DNA.  We share blood, heritage, lineage, and they are a given. Friends come and friends go, even the friendships in family.  But, the link of family is enternal.  I know that 1,000,000 years from now, a future Archaeologist or Anthropologist will be able to dig up my bones, and those of my Sister in IL, my daughter in the next county, my neice across the nation and know, beyond a doubt, that there was a close lineage there.  I also know that the friends of my heart, no matter how dear, will not be connected to me when they are digging up our bones. 

Recently, I have seen people state that your family is what you make it, that it is the ones you choose as family that matter the most.  I have to disagree.  The idea of creating family from friends is not something  I can get on board with.  Family is the foundation of our society.  The buzzword of the last Presidential campaign was family values.  That is the basic unit of our society, not only the ideal but the core.

Family matters,  So do friends.  Sometimes they overlap and the lines that delineate the two are blurred until they are almost impossible to discern.  But, they exist.  I love my friends and sometimes am outraged at my family.  But, at the end of the day, when I see my mother in my sister, or daughter, and my dad and my uncle in my brother, or my Gram in my grandson, I know the difference.  I do.