Today I’m feeling grateful for family.

When someone asks me about my family- I always pause before responding. Not because I don’t want to share, but because it’s an important question to me. I value my entire family- they are some of my closest friends. And I consider some of my non related close friends family too.

I wear a ring that says inside, “Family. I choose you.” It kind of describes all my feelings with one simple engraved sentence.

To me, family isn’t simply the biological people who have the same bloodline. Some of those people may never know I exist on a list and they don’t know anything about me.

My therapist once asked me to draw a family tree (she was confused). Not a typical one based on genealogy but one based on relationships. I worked on it for quite a long time. And when it was done- there were crooked lines, dotted lines, circles, footnotes, and the typical straight lines. The people on that sheet of people were my family. As non linear as it seemed. 

Luckily, I have some amazing biological family. My Mom, my Dad, my sister, niece and nephew, and some incredible Aunts and Uncles. I’m grateful to see my features on my two year old niece or my grandmother’s nose on my nephew. 

But the people who aren’t biological are my family as well. Those are the people that by circumstance or chance meetings, forever became a part of my life. My step-mom, my former step-mom and her husband,  step siblings, step nieces and nephews, and step grandparents. They don’t have to like me. And I don’t have to like them. But we do. I’m so grateful that we were introduced to each others’ lives in a way that brought us instant connection. And a trust where I know and appreciate their unconditional love for me and mine for them. 

I’m also grateful for the friends in my life that became family. The people I’ve known for so long that they simply become family. Their children are my family. People who love me for all my quirks and people I stand beside on their life journey.

No matter the relation, my nieces and nephews will never think they are not enough. I will never tell them they don’t count or they don’t mean as much because they aren’t related by blood. They are all equal in my heart. Truly.

I did not grow into a person where the biological is the only definition of family I know. I know all kinds of relations that make for family. 

And I am grateful.