Work Text:
“How do you define family?”
Things sure aren’t the way they used to be. My earliest memory with my parents is when they told me I was going to be a big brother. I was five at the time and over the moon at the prospect of being the big brother and teach my sibling everything there is to learn.
Things sure aren’t the way they used to be. I don’t have a sibling to teach everything there is to learn. I think it ruined my parents more than it should have. Because things have never gone back to the way they used to be, before my mother got pregnant, before my baby sister died, before they started blaming me for living.
When I think of family, I think of arguing, sometimes even fighting. I think of pain and tears and hopelessness. Medication, hospitals, divorces. I also think of hope, love, trust and compassion. But not when I think about my own family.
I started living inside a world that wasn’t real. No, I lived in a world where pirates were real but so were villains. Where princesses needed to be saved (like I wish I could have saved my baby sister) and were strong enough to survive no matter what.
It made me want to survive, no matter what.
That was my family from age seven until eleven, until realization came that fantasy worlds are frowned upon and it made me feel as sad as my mother was sometimes. Still, it felt like losing another part of me, the same that had happened when I was six and lost my own family to sorrow and mourning. Only now it was imaginary, still somehow hit just as hard, if not harder.
I ended up in that tears and hurt and hopelessness-filled world all over again. With a lot of anger added this time around. Towards me, towards my father, towards my mother, towards the world and even towards a God that I don’t believe in but my mother keeps talking to. Begging to.
The only anchor I had were school and my best friend. And so I became a top notch student, staying after school hours or go to the library to make homework and study chapters that didn’t require studying for. Anything to escape my home that with every passing day started to feel less like a home. I had surprisingly many sleepovers after a not so enjoyable conversation with my best friend’s parents about my home situation. And for a while they were my family and their house was my home away from my supposedly home that felt more like a haunted house most days.
My father being the villain and my mother being the wicked witch putting curses on everyone. No wonder my dad couldn’t cope and eventually left.
The older I get, the more perspective I can put in things and the more I realize that I’m not the only one wishing all of this had never happened. I taught myself that family doesn’t always have to be blood-related. Friends are the family we choose. They’re the family I built my life around. And even though I’m only seventeen and some people will claim that I’m way too young for what I’m about to write next: I’m starting to build my own family.
I’m seventeen but I know what it’s like to struggle and I know what it’s like to be a part of unhealthy relationships. My own relationship is not one of those, I won’t allow it. Family to me is irreplaceable. My mother and my father are still my family, but so is my boyfriend and his family. I spend my every day with them, live with them, and I belong to them.
That’s what family is. It makes you belong somewhere.
And whereas I used to think of family as fighting and hurting and tears and hopelessness, I now think of family as communication and loving and laughter and hope.
Things sure aren’t the way they used to be but they brought me to who I am today and brought me my new family whom I love. It’s different. It’s not better, it’s not the same, but it’s family nonetheless.
My family. Where I can belong.