Growing up I remember all of my friends having big families, with their parents still together, and always being considered weird because well, my parents were not together a single day of my almost 17 years of living. I had a big family, at least up until I was nine years old, with two older sisters, a big brother, my mom, and for a bit of my life, my dad. For as long as I could remember, I wished my parents were together. I saw my friends with their moms and dads together and always wondered what it was like to have non-divorced parents. Like I said, it was like this until I was nine, and although I had a dad and had two older sisters, I had little to no relationship with them.
When I was nine and lost my brother, my family almost seemed as though they took it as an opportunity to show their true colors, with court cases, fights, and more it got really ugly. However, when I was about 11 years old, I learned that, while I did not have good relationships with my blood-related family, what mattered most is the family you surround yourself with. You can choose your real family through friendships. Learning this helped me cope with the idea of not having a “real family” and allowed me to have some of the strongest and greatest friendships of my life. I will always remember that while you are born with a certain family, that is not who you are forced to surround yourself with and that you can choose your family.
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"You can choose your real family through friendships," that saying you wrote hit hard. It's true though family isn't always blood. It's the people in your life who want you in theirs. It's the ones who accept you for who you are, the ones who are there for you, and the ones that no matter what y'all go through you'll still be in each others lives at the end of the day.
ReplyDeleteI too remember feeling weird and different because my parents divorced when I was young and I grew up in a single parent household. Because of my parents’ messy divorce, I had strained relationships with a lot of my family members for a long time. I couldn’t agree more that the family you surround yourself with is what’s truly important and that “real family” isn’t necessarily related by blood.
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