Finding your families

It's usually easy to find the family into which you were born. Those people are, however, just your first family. As we move through life, we find other families, some temporary, others enduring. These are families we choose because their members share something vital with us.

I'm lucky enough, for example, to be part of a large extended family of people who live in this area and who plan to continue to live here.

Science fiction fans often find a family at conventions, where for intense weekends they feel they have finally found people who understand.

Tonight, I went to the celebration reading at Sarah's writers' camp. Many of those reading went out of the way to proclaim their love for this group and their joy in being part of it. Some even used the term "family." From watching the reactions of at least a few of the parents there, the usage clearly struck them as silly, threatening, or perhaps both.

They shouldn't react that way. They should be glad, damned glad, that their child has found a group that for at least these two weeks felt like a second home, another family. Being a human is tough work, at least in part because it's so damn hard not to feel alone. Being a teenager is terribly harder.

I understand the threatened feeling. At some level I think most of us parents would like to be able to be everything our kids need, but we can't be. It just doesn't work that way. We can love them with everything we have, treat them with respect and consideration, and hope we get to grow old with them both loving us and being our friends, but we have to allow them to find their other families as well.

I envy Sarah this group. If I had found such a gathering when I was a teen, you'd have had to drag me kicking and screaming away from it. I'd have given blood to have even a single day when I felt like all the people around me were like me.

My life is full of good people. My days are crammed with human contact. But inside I walk around feeling a little bit distant from everyone else, unworthy of anyone's love, somehow not quite human, at some level not sure how I'm supposed to act, the fires of passion and rage and love and joy all burning inside me so hot I sometimes don't know how to contain them. My families ground me, provide me brief instants when I think that someone else does understand.

Sarah, I suspect, gets many of those moments from her camp, and so do a lot of her fellow campers. Good for them. I hope they hold tight to those feelings and treasure them always. I hope they get more such wonderful moments from their birth families, as I hope Sarah gets more from us.

We all, each woman, man and child, need every bit of joy, every moment of understanding, every second of belonging that we can get.