Family, the part of my life that I'm totally proud of...
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Often, we believe (in my more sincere, and perhaps less popular, opinion) that family is something we take for granted. And, clearly it is not... While the blood and heritage of our ancestors binds our current existences and gives meaning to the members of our affective and relational groups, it is no less true that it is the togetherness, the empathy and the shared desire to enjoy life that makes the ordinary absolutely extraordinary. A pizza, a selfie, or even a short Sunday stroll through streets filled with spring rain and bad weather, can become memorable thanks to the elements that only a family can offer.
Sometimes, we are part of a group. At other times, we move away from that group with whom we share genes and blood, but where nothing else brings us closer. From a person whom I love and would give my life to but who could not donate a kidney to me (even if she wanted to) because she is not my immediate family, I learned that we are responsible for the people we choose to be with when we grow up. It goes against the belief about destiny or what we have grown up with since childhood, and even contradicts everything we have ‘learned’ culturally but nevertheless, take a look at your most powerful and stable relationships....
By this I am not implying that only outside the nucleus of the classical family true understanding and insight cannot be found, no. I am just expressing my point of view. I am just expressing my point of view. In my childhood, I grew up as an extremely lonely and isolated girl. Not for physical or psychological reasons, but because I had experiences as a social outcast, and I formed my mentality and personality on the basis of these events. I would have liked to have picked flowers in the fields with my mother and laughed over tea in the sunshine in the twilight of an ordinary afternoon. But nothing like that happened to me.
I grew up used to my skills, and therefore my abilities. That made me tough and extremely difficult to understand. ‘That girl is a tough character’, is the sentence that is most often repeated to me by those who once knew me. Even at my daughter's school she is like that. She, who fortunately has grown up with a different set of experiences and moral values, also considers that I can be a ‘very strong and brave woman’, sometimes... And although it may sound corny, I am convinced that it is all due to the absence or overexposure to love. In my case, more of the former and none of the latter.
My daughter is my antonym. As I am a mother, I have taken several moments to change the natural tendency of a life with limitations in love. For her, concepts like family, friendship and fun are frequent and natural. Not a day goes by without a kiss on the forehead before bedtime, or a hug on the way home from work every evening. Every fortnight, my boyfriend, she and I go out to eat. We take pictures, we laugh and we are a small but mighty family. We take care of each other, we keep each other happy and we foster that togetherness. Remember what I said at the beginning of this post, ‘we have a responsibility to choose our family’. I stand by that statement, and honour it as best as humanly possible.
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