I have a family. Originally, there were five of us. I’ve spoken of my Mom, Dad, sister, and brother. For my first sixteen years, that was it. It worked, more or less. We had some good times. I remember piling into the family pick-up truck and driving to Jasper National Park for camping trips, seeing bears, Dad putting up $20 for the first kid to spot wildlife and him telling the youngest (Dizzy) when he spotted it, so she’d win the money. I remember seeing a stump and insisting it was an animal.

I remember pizza bread nights and watching The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. Shelling peas until our fingers were green. I remember my Dad and my brother running races in the back field in their underpants! Oh, how we laughed! There were good times! Ice caves dug out of the hill by the root cellar, canoeing in the flooded North 40 pasture with my sister, my Dad insisting we wear life jackets because we could drown (even though the water was only knee deep). But all things end, eventually, whether by choice or divorce.

Now, I was lucky. While Mom and Dad’s marriage ended, they did everything to keep things normal for us. They set their shit aside and were grown up about it. The first year, Dad joined Mom, sis, and I for the last few days of our Great Girls Vacation because he could and because it made the summer holiday normal for us. Christmas was normal because he came home. This continues to this day, even though they both remarried.

My family is big now.

Mom remarried, sadly, my step dad passed away in 2019. Ken was larger than life in so many ways. He was the guy you called when you needed to know something. Ken always knew the answer. He came with four kids and made us a group of seven kids. And we were like stairs: 1968, 1970, 1972, 1974, 1975, 1977, and 1979!! Like what!! Between them, they shared fifteen grandchildren, and at last count, I believe there are nine or ten great grandchildren!

My Dad collected two of the greatest brothers ever! J & T are amazing, and I adore them. He also remarried. Mom #2 who is frighteningly a lot like me. Or, I guess, I’m a lot like her… or so I’m told. Ha! She is good to us all and brought my (evil) twin into the family. We are six months apart and a good, misfit little brother.

Families evolve and the best thing about remembering my family as it was is that I don’t really remember the tension that existed between my parents. It was there. I don’t remember arguments or difficult times or fights. I just remember the happy memories from my childhood and then this great big, oddly functional family that gets together and laughs, doesn’t ever seem to have enough room, but always makes room, has too much food, but no one ever leaves hungry (and if you do, it is your own fault). I remember the odd Christmas when we all packed into my Mom and Ken’s double wide mobile home, or Dad and Mom #2’s wedding at the Hall when it was ridiculously hot and my Mom baked all the desserts (there was SO MUCH BAKING), or my 40th birthday at the trailer and we laughed a lot.

Family is what you make it. Sometimes it is blood. Sometimes they are friends. Sometimes it is big and blended. Sometimes we have more than one kind of family. It isn’t so much about the kind of family but the memories you create with them that carry you through. As I get closer to fifty, I realize just how important all these crazy players are to me and how thankful I am to have had them all in my life.