When you are little, people will often ask you who your family is. When I would get asked this question, I would say it was my Grandma on my mom’s side of the family, who we only see once a year, my aunts and uncles on my dad’s side, who I only really saw on Christmas day, and my cousins who I rarely ever saw and never really enjoyed spending time with.

I always thought that this was what family meant. I thought “family” was defined by who you were related to, and I guess that’s somewhat true. But when kids at school talked about large and frequent family gatherings, cookouts, and vacations, I would wonder why my family never did these things. I would wonder why their families were so different from mine. I guess I just thought that maybe their families had more money than ours or that their families lived closer to them, and that was why they seemed to have these close relationships with their families. I would try to think really hard about what made my family my family and why they were special to me, but the only thing I could come up with was that we were related to one another. I guess I used to think that that was good enough. I had assumed when growing up that our families would be there for us because we shared blood ties, regardless of how close or distant we were to each other.

As I grew older, however, I started to question if this was true because, in times when my mom, dad, and I needed our family most, it was our friends who were there for us. When our basement flooded in the middle of the night, our friends, John and Clare, came to our house to help us clean up the mess. It was John and Clare who always supported my mom and me and who had always been there for us. It’s Clare who I see every day after school to help take care of her dog. And when John died, I felt true loss for the first time.

When I think of my favorite memories as a child, the ones that come to mind are going swimming at the lake in the summer and going skiing in the mountains in the winter with my mom’s friend’s kids. It’s laughing over inside jokes and sharing memories of the day over the dinner we made together with them. I can’t remember any times like those with my cousins. Soon I began to view family in a new light. I started to see who my real family was.

Now today, when someone asks me about who my family is, I tell them my family is John and Clare, who have loved and cared for me like grandparents, who I see every day after school, who we eat dinner with and build puzzles with, and who taught me to be confident and true to myself. My family is my mom’s friends and her kids, who can make me laugh so hard that it hurts and who have been with us through the good and the bad. I tell them that my family is the people with whom I choose to surround myself because they will always be there for me, and they will always be my family.

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