Family

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Family.

What is family?

Stupid question, right? That's what I'd have said a couple of years ago. Family is blood, not chosen, just made. Family are the people you can't walk away from, even when your old man takes a cricket bat to you for talking back, and your big brother puts a fuck off big scar down your back when you get in the way. Family is where you belong, even though your kid brother did try and murder your husband with silver chain when he found out you'd got knocked up. 

Family is where you belong, for better or worse. 

Then one day things begin to change. You don't know how they change, but they do. Perhaps it's the day that your big brother loses it on you, and for the first time you realise how lame the excuses you're making for him are. Perhaps it isn't perhaps it's one of a thousand days just slowly adding up, starting from the day you came downstairs to find broken glass all over the kitchen floor and your mother gone forever. 

Who the fuck knows who these things change, but change they do.

What is family?

I don't know any more. 

Is it my brothers, the old pack, the house where we grew up and where I held Raph as he cried?

Is it my husband - the one Raph refers to as 'oh...yeah...that guy' who married me without knowing the half of it, but decided to take a leap of faith. 

Is it my kid? Well, of course it's my kid. She's family until the end. She's the child I didn't plan, but chose to keep and chose to love.

And there's the rub. 

Choice.

What is family?

I didn't choose to have Holly. She was an accident, much like half my fucking life has been. But I chose to keep her, chose to love her, for better or worse. Which leaves me to ponder whether it's the choice or the lack of it which makes her family. 

And when I've got that answer I'll know the rest.