Response

What is Family?

                Family is one of those words that packs an almost overwhelming amount of meaning into a tiny package.  It is a small six letter word that leads one to recall memories of Christmas mornings, Thanksgiving dinners and 4^th of July fireworks.  It carries with it both positive and negative connotations and manages to cause such a stir of emotions that some people have difficulty defining exactly what it means to them.  The most commonly accepted definition of family is your relatives both related by blood and by marriage.  Many people include friends when they talk about family, lumping them into a kind of extended pseudo-family unit that includes people that think of each other as family even if they don’t share blood ties.

                So what does a family do?  I don’t mean the physical acts of being a family.  Think instead of what a family does for one another.  Family should be there to support you when you fail, celebrate your successes, help care for your illnesses, and commiserate with your sadness.  Families may not always see eye to eye on everything, but they always support each other’s decisions and offer help when it’s needed.  But is there another type of family? One that is not connected by birth or marriage or implied relation, but instead by a group of shared experiences that can only really be understood by the other people that shared them?

                For me, thinking of family creates a kind of dilemma.  On one hand I have my relatives; wife, mother, father, two brothers, and an assorted mix of in-laws and extended relatives.  On the other hand however, I have those people that I lived and worked with while I was in the military.  Is one of them more of a family than the other, or can they both exist together in a kind of hodge-podge that serves to fulfill everything that you need and expect of your family?

When I graduated high school, I immediately joined the military, the Army to be specific, and left for basic training shortly after.  While I was there I heard a term bandied about that lead me to believe that two separate families could indeed exist together.  That term was brother/sister in arms.  Now I had played sports in high school I knew about the camaraderie that a shared experience could bring and I thought that this was nothing more than a fancy term given to what basically equates to a bunch of teammates.  But the actual experience of it couldn’t have been farther from the truth and I didn’t really understand this until I left basic training and joined my first unit.

                Military life, at least for the single soldier, shares a strong resemblance with early college life.  We shared a barracks room, ate at the same cafeteria and went to the same place to work.  Early in my military career we even had homework together.  As time went on I began to think of my fellow soldiers as siblings.  We shared each other’s hopes, fears and dreams.  When one of us got promoted we all celebrated; when one of us got in trouble we all commiserated together.  After a while it seemed as though my fellow soldiers were more like my family than those relatives of mine that I had left behind.  Once the deployments started and we began to go to war together, I suddenly found myself understanding my fellow soldiers in a way that I never had with my relatives and I knew that they felt the same way about me.

                For some people this is a difficult concept to grasp.  How can a bunch of people from different backgrounds be closer to you than your own relatives?  The easiest way I can find to describe this is to equate it with a fraternity or sorority.  Many times people refer to these groups as a brotherhood or sisterhood and that is exactly what comes to mind when I think back on my time in the military.  Just as it is easier to talk to your fraternity brothers about how your life is going while you’re in college, so it is with my military family.  The experiences you share make it easier to comprehend just how those experiences affect you.

                Now this is not to say that I have no use for my relatives.  In fact, there are things that I wouldn’t share with my squad mates, just like there are things that you wouldn’t share with your frat brothers.  Your fraternity brothers might be great company when you want someone to help cheer you up after a bitter breakup, but for something like the death of a loved one or a bitter divorce, family is where most people turn to for comfort.  Maybe it’s because they are going through the experience with you or have gone through it before.  Maybe it’s because your family will be your family no matter what, while your friends can and do change over time.  And maybe it’s because when we are at our most vulnerable we know that our family will be there to support us no matter what.

                So maybe having two families is a good thing.  Maybe the things that are a weakness in one family could be considered a strength in another.  Of course, there is also the possibility that I am missing the point completely.  What I do know, is that the people that are closest to me and that are willing to support me in whatever I do, those are the people I want around me.  Whether they are my relatives, friends from the military, fellow college students, professors, coworkers, whoever, at the end of the day, those are the people that I care about and would do anything for.  Those are the people that I would take into my home without a second thought.  Those are the people that I would give the shirt off my back.  And those are the people that I consider my family.