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No one ever said families had to be made of people you're related to. Blood has nothing over bonds shared with friends. If you've had friendships that have survived marriages and divorces and deaths and misunderstandings and kids and job losses... If you have a friend who will answer the phone at two in the morning because your car has broken down in the worst part of town and they put a robe on over their pjs and come and get you...That's your family!
I was gonna rep ya' but I gotta spread the love around first!
My kids have no one. I am an only child, as is their father. His parents are dead, my Mother is alive, but she is crazy, the kids can't stand her. They have no cousins, or aunts, or uncles...no one. But, they have good parents. I never really worried about it, I was always too busy just trying to make a living...they never suffered, or wondered about it...we have always had friends though...
I was gonna rep ya' but I gotta spread the love around first!
LOL....I have the same problem as HH...gotta spread the love! Great post here DDI (as usual)! We have so many people in our lives who are not blood relatives. If it wasn't for us in their lives, they would have no one during the holidays. What is better than the huge hugs you get from these folks when you show up at their door with a plate of Christmas cookies, a birthday card for someone who is shut in and has no family? My children have so many "grammas and grampas, aunts and uncles" who are not blood relatives at all. They are our family out of "choice", not birth! LOL
There are many people out there who would GLADLY be surrogate family. As for the posters who don't live in the vicinity of their family...I am sorry. It must feel as if you're living in another time. Funny though, many years ago, I moved to the other side of the country. All I could think of was moving back, being near them. Now that I'm living within a 30-45 min drive from them, I rarely see them! Funny how that works.
How true those sayings are....You don't miss someone until they're gone...or Absence makes the heart grow fonder LOL
How do you all who share the same experience - of not having blood-related extended families - feel about what will happen to your children if something should happen to both you and your partner/spouse/other parent?
That's the one issue we sometimes have. We have some friends who have agreed to act as their - our kids - legal guardians should anything happen to both my husband and I, but that's such a huge responsibility to ask even good friends to take on.
You always hope that nothing bad like that should happen, but it's always best to be prepared for if it does.
Sometimes my husband and I even talk of taking separate flights so that if the plane crashes, one of us will still be OK. I know it sounds like crazy-talk, but when you are all that your kids have as far as relations, you tend to think about stuff like that.
Also more minor things like - who do you put down for emergency contact info... We have moved to new cities for my husbands job where we literally didn't know a single soul. So I never knew who to put down for our emergency contact info. It takes awhile to meet people and then learn them well enough and bond close enough to ask them if they wouldn't mind being your emergency contact person.
Just curious how others feel about these things, and what they do about these situations that come up when you don't have extended family.
This might sound harsh, but when my children were young enough to have to worry about where our children would go, if something happened to us....our family members were the LAST people on the list of candidates. We have a great deal of serious dysfunction on both sides of our family. We are the (gosh I know this sounds smug and judgemental), only sober/sane/rational members OF our families. The last people we would have wanted our children to be raised by are alcoholics and/or drug addicts. People who, in fact, have no trouble partaking in such substances with their children. "I'd rather they did it at home, than somewhere else!" Nooooo thank you!
This might sound harsh, but when my children were young enough to have to worry about where our children would go, if something happened to us....our family members were the LAST people on the list of candidates. We have a great deal of serious dysfunction on both sides of our family. We are the (gosh I know this sounds smug and judgemental), only sober/sane/rational members OF our families. The last people we would have wanted our children to be raised by are alcoholics and/or drug addicts. People who, in fact, have no trouble partaking in such substances with their children. "I'd rather they did it at home, than somewhere else!" Nooooo thank you!
My parents actually said that to me, too! "if you ever want to try (fill in the blank... drink, drugs, whatever)... do it with me...let me know and I'll show you the right way to buy it/do it/whatever" I also had a mother who left me for weekends with grown men, when I was 13 and under, because in her words, I "need to know what it was like to be loved by a man"... you know, since my dad wasn't around. (He went to prison for sex crimes against children.) Sweet, huh?
Ha ha... one of those "grown men" had a vampire fantasy life thing going on - he had a dentist actually glue fangs onto his teeth. He'd practice "biting" on me. He was like 27? I was 12/13? All alone, his apartment... he smoked popt and did coke and got drunk with my mom. Nice going, mom...
Yep. I think I know where you're coming from. Our relatives would be the last people on earth we'd want our kids going to, too.
My parents actually said that to me, too! "if you ever want to try (fill in the blank... drink, drugs, whatever)... do it with me...let me know and I'll show you the right way to buy it/do it/whatever" I also had a mother who left me for weekends with grown men, when I was 13 and under, because in her words, I "need to know what it was like to be loved by a man"... you know, since my dad wasn't around. (He went to prison for sex crimes against children.) Sweet, huh?
Ha ha... one of those "grown men" had a vampire fantasy life thing going on - he had a dentist actually glue fangs onto his teeth. He'd practice "biting" on me. He was like 27? I was 12/13? All alone, his apartment... he smoked popt and did coke and got drunk with my mom. Nice going, mom...
Yep. I think I know where you're coming from. Our relatives would be the last people on earth we'd want our kids going to, too.
Yeah.....What in the freaking world are some of these people thinking!!??
I am so sorry you were raised that way. Oh man, how horrible!! Yes, even when I lived at home....well, substance abuse was not a problem with my parents, but I was certainly in more danger at the hands of "family members" than I was anywhere else. Home and immediate family are often the worst scenarios.
Are you kidding?! If both my spouse and I died, the LAST person we would have wanted to have our kids was my Mom! We talked about it...and just sort of decided that it would never happen, after all, that is pretty remote. We listed one of my husband's friends, just in case...but probably it would have all been sorted out, like my daughter would have gone to live with her friend, I am sure her parents would have been okay with that...our sons would have gone with his friend, maybe one would have stayed with his other friend...we really did not worry about it too much...and it never happened, and now our kids are grown up...
We moved to Denver a few years ago from Florida and didn't know a soul. My family is in Washington and Arizona and his is in Arizona. We have had to do a lot of things on our own as a little family unit and sometimes that makes me sad. Every birthday party I had was full of cousins and relatives and my daughter's birthdays are usually just the 4 of us (though the 8 year old now has birthday parties with school friends).
There's not much you can do except not focus on what could be and instead make your immediate family unit as strong and close as you can be.
BTW, last year, we went to visit my husband's family and after spending about 15 minutes with his 3 sisters (who I like to call the Axis of Evil) and their horrible, superficial children (one of whom told my daughter that her favorite boots weren't cool because they weren't UGGS), I was grateful that her cousins aren't kids she's around all of the time. They are clones of their parents and it's better to merely see them every other year.
Not every family is perfect, but sometimes when you're far away from them and feeling sorry for yourself or your kids who aren't around them, you tend to gloss over their flaws. I honestly didn't remember how awful my sisters in law were but after we left, I felt like a weight was lifted off of my shoulders and I stopped thinking of them as the wonderful family that my children have to live away from.
We are very close to my family as well as most of my husband's family, however, we do not live near by them.
Almost everyone that we live near has family within a half hour of them , most of them even closer.
It is amazing to me that amount of time that these people go w/out talking to or seeing their family members who are within minutes of them, but the time they "need" to go out to dinner or see a movie, that is the 1st person they call.
We talk to my mom everyday almost and our kids talk about wanting to see their cousins & grandparents more. "Why don't we live near them", etc....
It is upsetting to hear that so many are estranged from their family, I don't understand it, but people have their reasons that are their business.
It is hard for me to listen to some of my extended family at home who complain about "having to go to this party or this family gathering" and "how easy we have it because we don't have to go here or there" .
Then again, my husband and I don't go out to dinner,we haven't found a babysitter in the 9 years we have been parents. Our nights out happen once every 6 months or so, when we have a family member visit us. That is it. We have never,ever been away from our children overnight.
So many people take advantage of their family for things like that, but the 1st time they are asked for something or the 1st time their family ISN'T available to babysit, they complain!
Living away from family, whether it is by choice or because of job needs, is difficult I think.
Certainly if the reason that there is no family close by is because they have passed away, that is a more difficult situation, emotionally I would think.
We have been lucky most of the time in our moves to find great friends, this last move has been the most difficult as most people again, are local & could care less about the transient newcomers.
There are of course, always nice people but no one that we would consider right now, to be great friends.
So, we do everything ourselves and we do not rely on nor expect anything from anyone....
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