You Must Choose – But Choose Wisely!

I do not believe in the tyranny of family. The simple act of sharing some specific genetic data doesn’t endear me to anyone who has my blood, and I don’t feel any more obligated towards a mother or father, brother or sister, cousin, aunt or uncle simply because society tells me that I’m supposed to. Screw society, and screw family! Accidents of blood are no basis for the foundation of lasting commitments, and so I refuse to honor such imposed dominion.

Except when I do.

I believe we choose our family, at least after a certain age. Naturally, a four-year-old can’t simply walk out of his house and move in with the neighbors whenever he decides that his mother is a fiendish tyrant who delights in his suffering every time she serves green beans and suspicious looking meats for dinner. At a certain point, however, the kid grows up and grows out and – if he chooses to – he can leave it all behind. The house, the yard, the town, the city, the state, the family – he can just walk away. After a quick kiss goodbye and a quicker kiss off, he’s on to bigger and better things.

At some point, you have to look to your left and look to your right, and take stock of the people around you. Are they there because you genuinely like them, and because they’re decent people who have earned and deserve your love and attentions? Or are they there for no other reason than for having come into this world through the same birth canal as you? Maybe one of them is the birth canal. Maybe another is the fleshy stick that poked at it late one night, when there was nothing better to do. It doesn’t matter what the physical connection is. What matters is whether the people in your life deserve to be there.

I’m fortunate to have parents who I find to be exceptional human beings, and my love for them is all the more significant precisely because it’s understood that I love them by choice, and not by genetic obligation. If they were beneath me as people, if they didn’t meet my standards, or if they were otherwise nothing more than sickening blights upon the proud and noble history of the human race, you can bet your grandma’s bingo card that I’d drop-kick them out of my life faster than you could spit out the rear window of a Japanese bullet train. And I wouldn’t give a damn!

Unfortunately, while all of the leaves and twigs and branches closest to me on the great, gnarled trunk of my family tree do actually deserve to be there, sharing my sunlight and chlorophyll, there are some branches of my biological family that I’d be perfectly fine with some well-meaning and industrious old lady coming along to enthusiastically trim them off my trunk with a vicious looking pair of rusty pruning shears. There are billions of people spinning through the universe with us on this little rock we call Earth, and I refuse to be burdened by a select and unworthy few of them simply because we are “related“, when there is no dearth of selection for better people into which I can invest my time, my energy, and my love.

Different strokes, for different folks, and so on, and so on, and scooby-dooby-doo.

The flip-side of this shiny ideological coin means, of course, that while you should be free to dismiss the hangers-on and bottom feeders of your genetic kith and kin, you must also be free to adopt strangers and friends into your own self-designed, non-biological brood. I have more non-related friends who I consider to be my closest family than I do actual relatives. These are the types of friends who I could call up at three o’clock in the morning on some random Tuesday, and ask them to drive six hours out of their way to meet me somewhere dark and scary, where people Should Not Go. They wouldn’t ask questions, they wouldn’t hesitate, and they certainly wouldn’t say no – not if I needed them. Likewise, they expect and demand the same sort of loyalty from me, and I try my best to see that I live up to their example, even if I’m pretty sure I often don’t.

I suspect that one of the reasons that Trey and I bonded so quickly and so strongly was precisely because I have no prejudice for sharing blood. I will never understand the strange compulsion people have to make little copies of themselves by spreading their seed and reproducing genetic semi-clones. If the human race were teetering on the sharp edge of some terrible precipice of extinction, I could probably get behind the need to reproduce. However, when the world is filled with millions upon millions of children who were simply unfortunate enough to have been born to uncaring or unable parents that either can’t or won’t take care of them, I will never be able to rationalize the selfish desire to breed.

If you want to raise a child, why not go out and help one who is already here, and who is sad and who is suffering in a brutal world that has never been kind to it? There is something far greater and nobler in adoption than there is with simply squirting out copies of yourself like some twisted biological mimeograph machine – and I wish more people would consider it. Unfortunately, society doesn’t exactly have great systems in place for dealing with orphaned or abandoned children. More often than not, it simply consumes them, and masticates the tender flesh of their young souls in the hideous chomping jaws of the dread machine called The System.

We constantly debate Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice in this country, yet neither side seems to consider what happens to a child after it’s born. Without a culture that willfully accepts the burden of millions of unwanted children, I don’t understand how anyone can support a Pro-Life agenda. Don’t get me wrong, though. While I’m no fan of abortion, I purposely don’t really have an opinion on the issue because I lack the equipment necessary to ever have to make that terrible choice, so I’m not going to tell any woman what she can or can’t do with her own body. However, it seems to me that all the Pro-Lifers can recite is that a fetus is alive and human, and that it has rights. I agree, but I don’t think those rights end after it punches its ticket on the Birth Canal Express and makes its way out into the big, bright world. The social stigmas need to be removed for “unwanted” children or orphans, and for the parents who adopt them. The suspicions of weak familial bonds in adoptive families need to vanish, and each and every one of us needs to contribute to the enormous financial obligation we have to every single child that is forced into this world. Sadly, what seems to happen is that, once birthed, the child becomes one of Those People, and no longer qualifies for the empathy and love of taxpayers.

But anyway, that’s all I have for you today. I encourage each of you to think about what I’ve been saying in this essay. It’s hardly a new concept, and I can’t claim it as my own – but I do hope that pausing for thought might help some of you to come to a conclusion you’ve been putting off for far too long. Family are those people in your life who you love and care for not because you’re supposed to, but because you want to. Because they’ve earned it. But if they ever – even for one second – prove themselves to be disloyal or dispassionate about your suffering, don’t be afraid to leave them behind.

There are better people out there in this wide world, and they want to know you just as much as you want to know them. I have a great family, simply because I’m careful about who I chose to allow into it, and because I don’t respect the imposition of blood ties. For example, while I am technically related to only a fraction of the following people, I have: two mothers, one father, a grandmother, a grandfather, several sisters, a bunch of brothers, a veritable herd of godchildren, and one wife and one son.

One of the metathemes running through Joss Whedon’s body of work is family.
Family by choice.

The great tragedy of family comes upon all of us, at some point or another. Someone out there in the world has a mook for a brother, who calls begging for money every two weeks like Swiss clockwork, and then disappears until he needs more. Someone else reading this is an aunt who’s concerned about a niece that’s fallen in with the wrong crowd, and has suddenly become too cool to return her worried calls. Elsewhere, there is a father who fancies himself a good man, but who is hurting his kids with thoughtless actions. Somewhere – everywhere – someone is disappointing someone else, and people are crying.

The lesson for today is, as usual, a simple one. Family doesn’t turn its back on one other. Family doesn’t wound each other, then sit there pouring lemon juice on it while telling you it shouldn’t hurt. Family does not hurt you. If it does, then it’s time to find someone better to love. Don’t pour your love into unworthy vessels. Find a friend. Find a lover. Find whatever.

Find…a real family.

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NOTE:  I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.

I'll take care of it.

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