Familial Bonds

What is the anchor that binds us?

I have a lot of family. And it is strange to feel so alone in the world and yet have such an extension of ancestry out into it.

And why do some pieces of family feel so obviously more like family? It’s complicated to wrestle with admitting, but among all of my half-siblings and step-siblings and parents and birth-parents and aunts and uncles and birth-aunts and birth-uncles and cousins and birth-cousins and nieces and nephews and grandparents and all of their step and birth-counterparts–*gasps for breath*–there’s the other, yet-mentioned group that feels different.

Without a doubt, they hold a particularly unparalleled place in my mightily loving heart. The one that aches with unrelenting loyalty, admiration, and… closeness. A closeness that when it is met all at once makes me feel less alone. They are the only people whose existence has ever done this. This transcendent feeling of family I have for the two brothers I grew up with is unequivocal. And I think I now know what it is. Where it comes from. It isn’t a tie one gets from shared blood or a shared roof. It isn’t about nature or nurture or friendship into our adulthood. I have a lot of that with both them and my varying relatives. It isn’t even about them as individuals. What sets them apart is a feeling that was anchored in me as a child. The feeling of mutual love that we shared with the parents who raised us. It is knowing that these two brothers of mine have that same anchor.

Only we three knew what it was to be loved by them.

We had such a beautifully magical, simple childhood and our parents loved us so fiercely and ultimately that it feels like a time capsule. A place so pure it never ceased to exist.

As distant as my brothers and I grow–as we get older and our lives continue on in different cities with different communities–there’s this thing we share. This trauma bond of losing our parents is a layer but much deeper is the loving bond of having them– of being watered and grown and tended to by their love, together.

I hope if I get the opportunity to have my own children, I too can give them that shared anchor in brethren that will live on long past Alan and I.

Riley is having his third kiddo soon, and my nieces–his two beautifully perfect, wild, playful, and curious daughters–will have another family root to hold them to this earth.

Familial bonds. It isn’t nature or nurture. Unrelenting love is the core of this sacred feeling of family. It takes true courage to love as wholly as good parents do. How blessed we were, and I hope you were too.

For a short story about our youth as siblings, harken back to this ditty: “Once Upon a Christmas Morning”

For a piece about my Mother’s condition + unconditional love, read: “Into the Depths”

For a piece about losing my Father, read: my Father’s Day Tribute.

Many thanks from the depths of my being for your readership!

A hui ho,

Julia