The Importance of Family

This past week I got some news about a family member that was not good, to say the least. I'm not going to go into what happened, but it got me thinking about my family and their importance in my life. Not everyone has an amazing family like I do. Not everyone is blessed enough to know that no matter what, they have a support system that will be there for them. And not everyone that I consider family is related to me by blood.

When I was younger, I tended to take my family for granted. I even thought that my family was weird. I grew up with my mother's side of the family. My grandparents had 10 kids. (Grampa would always joke that he wanted 6 kids and Grandma wanted 4 kids, so they compromised and had 10.) A small family dinner during the week was usually anywhere from 8- 12 people. Holidays were crazy with around 30+ people in a single house. I always had cousins around to play with, I spent weekends and sick days with my grandparents, and I always knew I could ask my aunts and uncles for help if I needed it.

Every year we would all get together at my grandparents' house for a few special occasions. Before Easter, we would make Pysanky eggs, then after Easter Mass, we would have an Easter egg hunt before dinner. In the fall, when the chili was harvested, we would all get together to chop, bag, and freeze roasted chili. During Advent, we would make tamales together to freeze for the rest of the year and bake biscochitos. Now that I am older, I miss these traditions. I wish that my children could know what it was like for me to grow up with that kind of family. Over the years, I've tried to keep these traditions alive, but it's just not the same.

As I've gotten older, my definition of what family is has grown. Family is the people who love you and are there for you when you need them. Family is so much more than who you share blood with. Before my husband joined the military, I only had a few friends that I thought of as family. After we had to move for the first time, I had to find a new family. I ended up with what I came to call my military family. Those men and women who were also so far from home, with no biological family to rely on. We celebrated together, helped each other through tough times, and made our own traditions together.

In college, my best friend and I started up what we called "Mexican Mondays". It was a night that we would get all our friends together, eat some kind of cheap Mexican food, drink, and watch bad movies. When I moved, Mexican Mondays morphed into Game Night. The same concept, just adding some games into the mix. We also started to blend our holiday traditions. Our first holiday season in Maryland was very interesting. We were celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, and Yule all in one night.

But just as I have come to consider friends as family, there are some family members that I no longer claim. I used to think that if someone was blood, you had to always be there for them and help them out. I've since learned how toxic that kind of thinking is. There are a few people, I'm not going to go into who, that I no longer consider family. And I did not come to this decision without a lot of consideration and thought. There are very few people in my life that I would call former family members. They all have one thing in common, they have done something so terrible that I cannot let them back into my life. You might be thinking that I should just forgive these people and move on. The truth is that most of them I have already forgiven, but that doesn't mean that they get to come back into my life.

Being a part of my family is a privilege that I take very seriously. I will love and defend my family until my last breath. But that does not mean that they have free reign to hurt or abuse without repercussions. I will stand by my family when they need me, but if they are in the wrong, I will tell them. I will not save them from the consequences of their actions, but I will still love them and support them. Family is not perfect, but they also should not be the ones who try to hurt you.