I want to start by saying something that might ruffle a few feathers, and if you know me at all by now, you know that has never once stopped me.
Family is complicated.
Not sometimes. Not for some people. For almost everyone, in ways large and small, funny and painful, infuriating and tender and everything in between. The idea that family is supposed to be this uncomplicated source of unconditional love and support and belonging — that picture-perfect holiday table where everyone gets along and nobody says the wrong thing and love flows freely in all directions — is one of the most persistent and quietly damaging myths we've been sold.
Real family is messier than that. Real family is a collection of human beings who did not choose each other, thrown together by biology or circumstance, each one carrying their own wounds and histories and ways of seeing the world, all trying to coexist and occasionally love each other well.
Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. Usually it's both, depending on the day and the year and how much everyone has had to drink at Thanksgiving.
And all of it — the warmth and the hurt and the laughter and the dysfunction and the love that persists in spite of everything — all of it deserves to be talked about honestly.
So that's what we're going to do today.
Let's start with the family you were born into. The ones you didn't pick.
There is something both beautiful and completely absurd about the family of origin when you think about it. You arrived on this earth having made zero decisions, and yet here were all these people — with their personalities and their baggage and their particular ways of doing things and their opinions about everything including how you should live your life — already assembled and waiting. Already yours, whether you liked it or not.
Some of you hit the lottery. You were born into warmth and stability and people who, despite their imperfections, fundamentally had your back. Who showed up. Who made you feel like you belonged somewhere on this earth before you were old enough to earn it. If that's you, hold onto that. Tend to those relationships. Don't take them for granted for even one single day because I promise you, not everyone has what you have.
And some of you — many of you — were born into something harder than that.
Maybe your family was loving but limited. Good intentions wrapped around generational wounds that nobody ever dealt with, patterns passed down like heirlooms that nobody actually wanted but nobody knew how to stop carrying. Maybe they loved you the best they could and their best fell short in ways that left marks.
Maybe your family was chaotic. Unpredictable. A place where love and hurt lived so close together you still have trouble telling them apart.
Maybe your family was absent. Physically or emotionally or both. Maybe the word family conjures not warmth but a particular kind of hollow ache — the ghost of something that should have been there and wasn't.
All of those experiences are real. All of them are valid. And none of them are your fault.
Here is something I want you to understand about the family you were born into, whatever form they took.
They were people before they were your family.
I know that sounds simple but I want you to really sit with it. Your parents, your grandparents, the aunts and uncles and siblings who shaped your earliest understanding of what love and safety and belonging looked like — they were full human beings with their own childhoods, their own wounds, their own unmet needs and unresolved grief and inherited patterns that nobody ever helped them examine.
This does not excuse harm. I want to be very clear about that. Understanding where someone's damage comes from does not obligate you to absorb it. Knowing that your mother was wounded does not mean you have to accept being wounded by her. Context is not the same as permission.
But understanding — really understanding, as an adult with some distance and perspective — can sometimes loosen the grip of the story just enough to let you breathe. It can move you from what is wrong with me that my own family couldn't love me right to what happened to them that made loving well so hard.
That shift doesn't erase the pain. But it does change where you carry it.
Let's talk about the complicated ones. Because most families have them.
The relative who means well but says everything wrong. The one who asks about your weight at every gathering like it's a wellness check. The one who gives advice that nobody asked for with the confidence of someone who has never once been wrong about anything in their entire life. The one who brings up the thing from fifteen years ago as casually as they pass the bread rolls.
And then there are the harder ones. The ones whose behavior goes beyond annoying into genuinely hurtful. The ones whose presence costs you something real — your peace, your sense of self, your emotional stability for days after you see them. The ones you love because they are family and struggle with because of who they are, and the tension between those two things is exhausting.
Here is where I'm going to be direct with you, because that's what I do.
Love does not require unlimited access.
You can love someone and see them less. You can love someone and have boundaries around how much of yourself you give in their presence. You can love someone and acknowledge, with clarity and without guilt, that spending time with them is not good for you and make decisions accordingly.
Family membership does not come with an automatic pass to your peace. I don't care what anyone says about blood being thicker than water. Your wellbeing matters. Your mental and emotional health matters. And choosing to protect it — even from family, especially from family — is not a betrayal of love.
It is, in fact, an act of love. For yourself. And sometimes even for them.
Now. Let's talk about the family you choose.
Because here is what I know to be absolutely, unequivocally true: family is not only biology. Family is not only the people you were born to or born alongside. Family is the people who show up. The ones who choose you, consistently and freely, not because they have to but because they want to.
Your chosen family might be friends who have known you so long and so well that the line between friend and family blurred somewhere years ago and nobody can quite remember where. It might be a mentor who saw something in you and invested in it. It might be a neighbor who became something more. It might be a partner and the world you've built together. It might be a community — a church, a group, a collection of people organized around something you all care about — that gave you the sense of belonging you didn't always find at home.
Chosen family is real family. I will not entertain any argument to the contrary.
And in some ways, chosen family is its own particular kind of gift, because it is entirely voluntary. Every single person in your chosen family looked at you — knowing you, having seen you, having been through things with you — and said yes. I choose this. I choose you. Not because of obligation or history or shared last names, but because of who you are and what we are together.
If that is not love, I don't know what is.
I want to speak for a moment to the ones who feel like they have neither.
The ones whose family of origin is gone, or estranged, or never really there to begin with. And who haven't yet built the chosen family that fills that space. Who move through the world feeling a little untethered, a little without anchor, a little like everyone else has a place they belong and somehow that memo didn't reach them.
I see you. And I want to say something important.
The absence of family — chosen or born — is not a reflection of your lovability. It is a circumstance. Often a painful one. But a circumstance.
Chosen family is built, and building takes time. It requires showing up, repeatedly, and allowing yourself to be known, which I understand is terrifying when you've been hurt by the people who were supposed to know you best. It requires vulnerability, which feels dangerous when vulnerability has cost you before. It requires a willingness to try again, which is perhaps the bravest thing any of us ever do.
But it is possible. It is absolutely, completely possible. And you deserve it.
Start small. One person. One honest conversation. One text that says I've been thinking about you. One invitation extended without knowing for certain it will be accepted. That is how chosen family begins. Not with a grand gesture but with a small, brave, repeated reaching toward another human being.
Here's what I want to say about all of it — the born family and the chosen family and the complicated beautiful messy middle of it all.
Hold the good ones close. The ones who show up, who tell you the truth, who make you feel like yourself, who love you on the hard days as well as the easy ones. Tell them what they mean to you. Not someday. Now. People need to hear it while they're here to receive it.
Give grace to the imperfect ones — including yourself. Nobody in any family, chosen or born, gets it right all the time. Nobody loves perfectly. Everybody is working with a combination of their best intentions and their deepest wounds, and that combination produces results that are sometimes beautiful and sometimes a mess. Grace is not the same as acceptance of harm. But it is the thing that makes long relationships survivable.
Release the ones who cost more than they give, without cruelty and without guilt. Some relationships, even family ones, have run their course. Some people, even people you love, cannot be in your life in the way they currently are without damaging something essential in you. Releasing someone is not the same as hating them. It is not the same as saying they don't matter. It is saying — I care about myself enough to make a hard choice, and I care about you enough not to pretend anymore.
And build. Keep building. Keep reaching toward the people who feel like home. Keep showing up. Keep being the kind of person who makes others feel chosen and seen and like they belong somewhere on this earth.
Because that — that feeling of belonging, of being known, of having people who are yours and knowing you are theirs — is one of the most fundamental human needs there is.
You deserve to have it met.
Family is weird. Family is wonderful. Family is the thing that shapes us most and confuses us longest and, at its best, holds us through everything this life throws at us.
Whether yours looks like a holiday table full of people who share your nose, or a group chat that never stops going, or one person who has shown up for you so consistently that the word family is the only one that fits —
You belong somewhere.
And if you haven't found it yet, keep looking.
I'll be right here in the meantime.
You're already part of mine.
Love, Mom 🧡
