Diary of an Adult Orphan

So what is family?

My family was small perhaps. It was just my parents and me for a long time, then it was the 4 of us when my brother was born. We were pretty close to my dad’s family that was pretty large with all the extensions, but immediate family, that was small. Not to mention, they lived on another continent. My mother on the other hand was the oldest of 8 children, and an even larger extended family.

I never knew them though. I met a couple of her siblings over the years briefly, spoke to my grandmother not even a handful of times on the phone, never in person, and remember only one birthday card where my name was spelled wrong. My mother was estranged from her family, which meant I didn’t know them. Her second grade teacher and her teacher’s husband were who she considered her mother and father, and who I grew up calling grandma and grandpa. It made for interesting conversation to explain to people why a Catholic Latina like me had Hungarian Jews for grandparents, but that was us.

I have though in the last few years started keeping in touch with my mother’s biological family. It started just before she died, just before my wedding, but stopped when I discovered my mother would be coming up for my wedding, and I didn’t want to risk having to invite her family to where she’d be. Our lives at that point had become very complicated.

After my mother’s death, I got in touch with her family. Mostly because I felt they had a right to know about her passing, and that lead them all to try and reach out to me. I also think my mother would have wanted that as well. Two weeks before she died, she sent her mother and a few siblings a postcard to try and reconnect. Because of international mail, the card arrived just days after she passed.

This has for the most part been a positive experience. I’ve been talking to two of her sisters who are very kind, a few times to my grandmother whose English I can’t understand, and who doesn’t understand my Spanish, but whom I’ve found rather funny. I’ve also connected with a lot of my cousins on Facebook. Isn’t technology grand? And it’s been good. Both my brother and I are awed by all the family resemblances. I didn’t much look like my father’s side, that was all little brother, but I’m the spitting image of my mother’s family.

Yet, even though everything seems to be coming up roses, I still have this feeling of dread in talking to them.

They are so vastly different than how we grew up, their values, their life, their cultural identity. Granted, it’s hard to judge the whole lot, there are just so many of them, 7 siblings, each with kids, and some of those even have kids. It’s exponential! Though still, it’s a very different mentality. Also, I have a hard time shaking this feeling that they aren’t really who I should be calling family. They are blood relatives, but they aren’t family. At least not yet.

My family was my parents and brother. My family was my dad’s sisters, who weren’t really sisters, but foster kids who never left, but who were loved and raised as family. I didn’t know that they didn’t even have the same last name for years! My family is the woman 24 years ago my parents met on a plane with a 9month old boy she and her husband were adopting, and with whom we spent countless holidays, visits, sleepovers, had phone calls, and letters and birthday greetings since. My family is my mother’s college friend who flew 3000 miles to be at my confirmation, and whose father took me to Disneyland to avoid a funeral when I was 2. It’s the woman who came over once to get lessons from my mother and stayed to help decorate my baptism party and 22 years later made my ring-bearer’s pillow for my wedding. It’s my mother’s student who agreed to tutor me in science when I was home schooled, and years later traveled with me and my mother and was a much needed buffer to keep the peace.

These people are family. These are the people I think about when I want to announce news. They are the people I call when I need someone to lean on. It’s their faces that litter my photo albums and my childhood memories. These other people that look like me, and have the same name as my mother, they aren’t family, they are strangers. I want to reach out. I want to develop these relationships. I want to connect to them. But the truth is, I don’t know who they are.

The older I get, the more I realize how little blood really defines family.

I’m not willing to give up knowing them yet. Perhaps one day they will be members of my family, and I hope knowing them will give me insight into better knowing my mother. But right now, they are just strangers who have a familiar face.