CHAPTER 2: Family As Defined
You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.
– Desmond Tutu
You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them. All sales are final. No Exchanges. No Returns.
– Someone who is not named Desmond Tutu
Family has multiple definitions. I know because I googled it. Here are some of the formal definitions:
Family (n):
- a group of one or more parents and their children living together as a unit;
- a group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or affinity (by marriage or other relationship);
- all the descendants of a common ancestor, a clan:
- a group, or collection of related things or items with similar properties.
In comparison to the definitions above, my family was more akin to a collection or a clan than a classical ‘Mom, Dad, two kids, a dog, cat, and a goldfish’ kind of family. I guess a dated term might be the Ozzie and Harriet family (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet). Or you could advance a few decades on your TV and come up with the Cunninghams (Happy Days), or the Huxtables (The Cosby Show), or the Keatons (Family Ties), all of whom we were not.
If I had to nail it down, I’d say we were more a mashup of the Brady Bunch and the Addams Family. Siblings with different parents, joining full siblings, half-siblings and stepsiblings into a creepy and somewhat kooky clan, with wackiness occurring on a regularly scheduled weekly basis. Our family was akin to a small ranch house which grew into a two-story bi-level through a series of additions and renovations, each one made without recognition of the original plan, or any consideration for what might come next. It was assembled much like Frankenstein’s monster, without the instant horror typically experienced upon first sight.