Sure, I only created the title to get your attention – hopefully.  Sometimes my brain works in very strange ways, going off in tangents that I’m not always in control of.  If you sit and think about family, the thing you DON’T always get to pick, it really can mess with your mind.  The idea that you or I even exist is so fragile and was based on so many variables that if you think about it too much it can make your brain hurt.  Are all of those variables a matter of personal choice or is it fate or something even greater in charge?

Think of your parents.  How did they meet?  What history did they have before they met that caused them to be interested in each other?  Did they just happen to be in the right place at the right time?  Were they coming off of a bad relationship?  Was it a matter of convenience or were they childhood sweethearts?  My parents met in San Antonio Texas, far away from their original homes of Chicago, Illinois and Hamilton, Ohio.  They were both serving in the Air Force, both were divorced.  My dad was 33 and my mom was 20.  Both had lost children.  My dad was an introvert and my mom an extrovert.  They came from completely different backgrounds and were almost a generation apart in age.  My younger brother and I are a product of that union. We were never quite sure they loved each other as it seemed they tolerated each other most of the time, but towards the end I believed they were certainly dependent upon each other.  But I exist because they chose to be together.

My husband was raised his entire childhood in Bewley Hollow in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, the same place his mother and previous generations had lived before him.  I was born in San Antonio as an Air Force brat, so I moved to many places during my childhood.  When my dad retired, after crisscrossing the country one summer to decide where to live, we settled in Kentucky because at the time, my maternal grandmother lived there.  So Lexington it was.  I was set to go the University of Kentucky and my future husband was set to go to Morehead University until fate stepped in.  He made the decision not to go to Morehead and go to UK instead, where we eventually met.  I had dated many people, he had not.  He was raised in a rural area, me in mostly urban.  He’s an extrovert, I’m an introvert.  He’s a trumpet player, I’m a soprano.  Right there tells me it never should have worked!  We were almost 21 when we married and by all accounts, according to research marrying that young can increase your odds of divorce.  But here we are, nearly 38 years later, best friends and inseparable.  Think of the astronomical odds against us meeting at all, much less getting married, but here we are.  To make it even more weird, we attended many of the same band events during high school from our respective schools and never met.  So close.

Then I look at my children.  They exist because of the two of us and the timing of deciding (or not deciding) when we were going to have children. We have three boys and we chose to move those three boys from Ohio to Nebraska where two of them have met their spouses.  The thought that we decided to move and how it impacted these future relationships sometimes challenges my thinking.  Did we move because it was our destiny to move and their destiny to meet each other?  Did we keep them from meeting others they might have married if we had stayed?  One son and daughter in law are making the decision to adopt.  If we hadn’t moved here, where would that child have gone?

The whole process is really a bit strange in our culture if you think about it, and obviously I am, WAY to deeply.  Most of us find ourselves looking for that one person to spend the rest of our lives with.  Others are totally comfortable being by themselves. It’s a crap shoot, isn’t it?  How do we KNOW that this is the person we were meant to be with forever?  You can choose to love or not to love and maintaining a long term relationship is HARD, even with your best friend.  After all, you have decided to stay with that person til death do you part, right?  That could be 60 years and life has a way of getting in the way.  Can you stand to be with one person for that long?  Think of the roommates you couldn’t stand after six months when you discovered all of their bad habits and then you make a decision to marry or live with someone for the rest of your life?  Is it fate?  Is it choice?  Are you forcing something that wasn’t meant to be and just making it work or have you found that perfect person who encourages you to be a better human being and vice versa?

I’ve discovered that yes, you CAN pick your nose, uh, I mean friends and those friends can truly become family.  You can’t pick the family you were born into but you CAN choose to be the best person you can be regardless of whether you pursue a long term relationship or not.  Picking a significant other, should you want to, can be a challenge, but what I think I discovered is that if you overthink it, it’s not the right person.  If you’re questioning, “is this the one?”, it’s probably not.  Because I think you’ll know when it’s right.  It doesn’t mean it won’t be hard and there won’t be challenges along the way, but you’ll know.  I did.