Family can be a word to extricate you. I have to get home to my family. Conversely it can also be a word to imply a knot to bind you. I am in the family way. I have a family obligation.
When I married Jim I gained five brothers-in-law and five sisters-in-law. (In-law is an awkward term. My brother-in-law Gus and I call our selves the outlaws because the word outlaws sounds way more badass.)
My husband’s brother Dan was the first to be married. I can't hear the song Born to Run without thinking of Dan and Lisa's wedding in 1987. They stood on a table and gave high fives as everybody ran down the dance floor. My husband was not yet my husband. We were teenagers sitting at the corner table waiting for our chance to sneak off and make out. Dan and Lisa had everything figured out. I looked up to them. They were cool and fun and above all, kind.
My wedding was five years later. Looking back I can recall my husband’s family’s kindnesses like knots on a nineteen-year long string. They are too many to name but for a sampling:
They arranged with our hotel to pay for dinner every night of our honeymoon. When Jim had just started grad school, they pre paid our motel room so we could afford to go along on the annual tree trip.
Jim's sister Anne looked after my youngest daughter when she was a baby and I had to go back to work. Anne was one of my baby's first words. Just last month Anne took my oldest on a road trip to explore college campuses.
My daughter’s aunts and uncles and cousins take them to the city, to the park, to restaurants, to ice-skating, to the beach. The cousins tell inside jokes together and appear in family photos together and share a history that began with their first memories and will stretch out into their old ages. My girls were born into an enormous web of support and love. Our family has been their greatest birthright.
After Thanksgiving this past year, Greg and Elaine gave us their gently used oven for free instead of selling it on Craigslist. It works like new. Our old stove had one working burner. Every time I make dinner now I want to weep in gratitude.
Ed and Kristine have the loveliest children you've ever met. Ed and Kristine were brave enough to have six and they are gentle and beautiful and intelligent and so kind to each other that you just want to watch them be together because it makes you feel better about the world.
Any time I've needed advice Tom has made time to talk with me despite his busy schedule. Tom and Kirsten hosted Christmas Eve and ordered cracked crab for everybody and compiled a photo slideshow of twenty years of tree trips and summer vacations and times together. Kirsten is so good at taking pictures.
Last night Dan and Lisa hosted Christmas dinner. They are still cool and fun and kind. They still love Bruce Springsteen and have a signed Born to Run poster hanging up in their TV room.
At dinner Anne’s husband Gus sat next to me and said he knows that I will make it as a writer. He said it is just a matter of time. I felt like weeping in gratitude.
We snapped Christmas poppers and donned paper crowns. We wedged in at long tables, some of our children older than I was at Dan and Lisa’s wedding. They are strapping, self-confident, good people with the integrity and self-sufficiency of their fathers and mothers. We said our Grace together before eating and I said my own private prayer too.
Because lately I have been feeling at loose ends in my life. Because last night I was reminded that when I married the best person I’ve ever met the day after Christmas nineteen years ago, I also tethered myself to the good and loving people he came from.
Our family.
