Chosen Families

Warning: This post is long, nerdy, and sappy. So move along if you don't want to read that. But if you've ever found yourself in the position where you've been abused or disowned by your family or had family issues so badly that you lose your connection to some of your relatives, it just might be the post for you. Also, it's more of a mental health and relationships type of post, but I feel like focusing on that stuff is good for your soul and figuring out how you define those types of things is connected to spirituality, however loosely.

Society warns us not to put too much time into consuming entertainment media. We can read articles of professionals lamenting the amount of time the average person spends on the internet or watching television. We ironically read articles on the internet and shared on our facebook feeds of baby boomers complaining about how much time millennials spend on their smart phones or on social media. To be honest, that has always been hilarious to me. Who are you to judge? You're right here too doing the same thing. However, I can agree that all things are best in moderation. More importantly, if we are going to consume media, we shouldn't do so while absent-minded and bored, we should think critically about the media we consume and view it as a mirror of society. We can stare mindlessly at the television or we can learn from it. We can be inspired by it. That's the path I choose. So I'd like to spend a few minutes discussing some of the media I enjoy and how it has affected my view on life.

Growing up, my favorite television show was Roseanne. It always reminded me of my own family, with loud, out-spoken women, loving yet frequently arguing family members, all struggling to get by financially who don't quite have their life together. It's simultaneously relatable and hilarious, which makes it unsurprising to me that it was one of the most successful sitcoms of all time. Of course, that show focused on a typical family unit: married parents, a biological sister and mother of the sitcom mom, and the married couple's three biological children. Marriage is part of the typical family unit, so when Mark and David both eventually married into the family, they became part of the traditional family unit in that way. However, David joined the family long before he officially and legally became a member. Roseanne let him live with them when she saw how verbally, mentally, and emotionally abusive his own mother was. She allowed him to stay there even when Darlene, his girlfriend and their daughter, broke up with him and moved away from home herself. He became a chosen member of their family and as much their son as any of their biological children.

Another one of my all time favorite television series is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There have been many academic papers and books written about this show and it's huge cultural impact on our society, so much that the field even has it's own name, "Buffy Studies," and has had it's own academic journal compiling the writings. This show has certainly affected my views in many ways, including my views on feminism and spirituality/faith. One concept from Buffy which has been focused on quite frequently has been the idea of "chosen families" evident in the series, as well as in many other of Whedon's works and other television series in the same genre.

The main character, Buffy Summers, has a biological family, of course. She has her mother Joyce Summers whom she loves dearly. Their relationship hasn't always been perfect, what with Joyce kicking Buffy out of their house in season two, a decision which she immediately regrets, and with leaving her daughter alone on some holidays, such as Thanksgiving in season four. Buffy also fears that her parents' divorce may be partially her fault and it is undeniable that their need to relocate was due to events that happened after she was first called to be the Slayer. However, her mother was both a part of her biological family and her chosen family. Their bond was strong and loving, as the bond between parent and child should be. Her relationship with her father was no where near as tight and in later seasons of the show he was only mentioned, never seen, as he didn't even make it to his former wife's funeral. Buffy's little sister Dawn is an unusual case, in some ways her biological sister but in other ways, not true family at all. She was created out of Buffy's dna and all memories of her were fabricated, but as far as Buffy was concerned, she was family and fully her sister.

However, Buffy's family was far larger than that. Buffy's family was a chosen family, made up of her friend Willow, whose own biological family was only seen once, Xander, whose biological family was shown to be quite dysfunctional, and her watcher Giles, who fulfilled the role of father-figure in their lives. Their romantic partners eventually also joined their "family" to varying degrees, including Cordelia, Anya, Tara, Angel, and Spike. This concept of chosen families was mentioned outright in an episode where Tara's biological and abusive family came to force her to leave with them and her new friends stopped them from doing so, claiming she was already with her family by being with them. After Buffy died in the season five finale, Dawn's primary caregivers included Willow and her girlfriend Tara who had moved into the Summers' house, Giles who remained a father-figure, Xander and Anya who babysat and drove her to school, and Spike, the vampire who looked after her and babysat her as her own personal bodyguard. Dawn was only a minor, yet was fully being taken care of by a "family" which consisted of no biological family. None of them were legally bound to care for her, yet all joined together as her chosen family to do so anyway. Even after breaking up with Willow, Tara remained a large part of Dawn's life. They chose each other as family and their bond was just as strong if not much stronger than their bonds with their biological family.

This theme of "chosen families" continued into the Buffy spinoff series Angel as well. Angel, Cordelia, Wesley, Gunn, Fred, and Lorne all formed a chosen family together and all acted as family toward Angel's biological son, Connor. Their relationships with each other had ups and downs and wasn't always great, but the same is true for biological families. Often, people view biological family has the people you have to love, but consider friendships to be different and drop them if there starts to be problems. However, this wasn't the case in Angel and it's not the case in my real life either. At the end of the day, their love for each other and their bond was undeniable and lasted until the end. This theme continues into some of Whedon's other works as well, such as the tragically short-lived sci-fi space western series Firefly and it's follow up film Serenity. The crew of the spaceship Serenity were very much a team of misfits thrown together primarily by circumstance but who formed a family out of each other. This chosen family included the captain, veteran, rebel, and criminal Malcolm Reynolds, his best friend Zoe who served alongside him in the military and who became his first mate on his ship, her husband Wash who served as the ship's pilot, Kaylee, a young woman who worked as the ship's mechanic, Jayne, a man who served as the gun-and-muscle of the group but who was sometimes lacking in morals and intelligence, and Inara, a companion (high class escort legally working as part of a guild or union) who rented a shuttle on the ship. They were joined by three passengers during the pilot episode: the aging preacher Shepherd Book, Simon Tam, a highly educated young man from a well-off family, and his insane, genius sister with special abilities, River Tam, both of whom were fugitives.

The crew and passengers of Serenity formed a chosen family of misfit criminals fighting against a corrupt regime, a theme certainly not uncommon in fantasy, science fiction, and other related genres of television, and found throughout several of my favorite shows. This same setup is seen in the science fiction/space travel television series Farscape, produced by the Jim Henson Company. John Crichton, a human from modern-day Earth (modern for that time anyway, the show aired in the late 90s-early 00s) and astronaut who found himself shot through a wormhole to a distant part of the universe and pulled onto a living spaceship full of prisoners-turned-fugitives running from a corrupt government who would form a chosen family with each other. This setup is also seen in the historical fiction television series Robin Hood which aired from 2006-2009 on BBC, which followed the legendary Robin Hood and his gang, or chosen family (known as his merry men in the original legends), made up of outlaws who found themselves in that situation almost entirely based on being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but who decided to join together both for their own survival and their desire to be heroes for others. Even in shows like Smallville, which doesn't resemble that same setup at all, the idea of chosen families can be found when the Kents literally find a stray alien child in a field who needed a home and took him in as their adopted son, when they symbolically adopted a few of his friends into their family, including Pete whom was trusted with his secret origins and abilities fairly early on and Lex whom did not have a functional family or good parental role models of his own. In later seasons, Clark's best friend Chloe becomes his chosen family, with them becoming closer to each other than most of their actual family members, and by the series' end with his upcoming marriage to her cousin will finally become officially family. Even after Clark has the opportunity to meet some of his real biological family, he still remains closer to his adopted family and his chosen family member Chloe than his actual family members. When Chloe's friend and classmate Lana moves in with her and her father, Chloe adds her onto a family tree homework assignment as her "sister" despite them not being biologically related or related through marriage, to show that she views her as part of her family, the family she chose.

This theme of chosen families is seen across various forms of fiction including television series, movies (such as Guardians of the Galaxy for one recent example that I can think of), literature, theater, etc. and it is absolutely something that we can learn from and be inspired by in our own lives. I was raised to view this as normal growing up. My grandmother's best friend was a woman who worked with my grandfather and who was around the same age as her eldest son (my uncle). She was Italian, just as my grandparents were, and an immigrant who had much in common with my family. However, she had no biological family in the States. My grandmother fully and completely brought them into our family as chosen family members. She always told me she viewed that woman as not only a friend, but as the daughter she never had. She babysat and treated the woman's children as her own grandchildren and I grew up viewing them more as cousins than friends of the family. They were invited to spend every holiday and birthday with us and her daughter, who was the same age as my sister, even had her own bedroom at my grandmother's house which eventually got passed down to me. When I became best friends with one of my grandmother's neighbors, she started to view that girl and her sister as her own grandchildren and extensions of our family. When one of my mother's best friends needed a place to stay, she moved in and lived on our couch for months (we didn't have any spare rooms or beds). When one of my best friends needed a place to stay in high school, my mother invited her to live with us and she did stay for about a week. When my family was going through a very rough time with medical issues, my best friend's family offered to take care of me. They took me to school every day, I went to her grandmother's house after school every day, and then to her parents' house until my father could pick me up at night. They were the ones who ensured my homework got done, they were the ones who fed me dinner, they were the ones who watched after me. And now, they view me a part of their family just as my parents view their daughter, my best friend, as part of ours. My husband and I share a best friend who lived with us around the time we got married. Even when he lost his job and could no longer afford rent, we picked up the slack and he continued living with us. I view his children as my own family and will always do whatever I can to help them and care for them. When his youngest child was born and we visited them in the hospital, a nurse came in and he introduced us to the nurse as "the aunt and uncle" despite us not "officially" being family.

The fiction I consume has always reflected my real life in this way. Our families are not just the people we are biologically or legally related to, they are also just as much made up of the people we choose and the people who choose us. In my eyes, my family does not include some of my actual relatives. There are some who have never seemed to genuinely care about me and so they aren't part of my chosen family. Instead, my chosen family, the people I recognize as family, is made up of a select few of my actual relatives and a select few best friends. I wouldn't have it any other way. I would do anything for these people and I know they would do the same for me. These are the relationships that I care about nurturing. The relationships I have with some of my actual relatives are so distant or toxic that I know they aren't worth it. My relatives (I won't even call them family, they're just people I'm unfortunately related to) include a cousin who tried to kill my aunt and my sister, a grandfather who abused my grandmother so badly that he thought he killed her and left her for dead (both of those relatives are dead now), and a cousin who molested me as a child and regularly violently attacked his brother. Just because I'm related to them doesn't make them my family. My sister's biological father was a rapist who threatened to murder her as a baby. Being her biological father didn't make him her dad. I have some blood relatives who are or were absolutely amazing people who are part of my chosen family as well as my biological family and who I would always choose, even if we weren't related. I don't mean for this post to sound anti-biological family, because it isn't. The person I was closest to in the world was a biological family member. All I'm saying is sometimes our relatives are wonderful people, but sometimes they're the worst people you can imagine. If you're stuck with some of the latter, you don't have to recognize them as family if you don't want to. If you have friends that are way better, consider yourself blessed, and go right ahead considering them family instead. Doing so will improve your mental health and spiritual well being. In my eyes, my chosen family is my real family and I'm so grateful for every single one of them, whether they're my actual relatives or not. We might not get to choose our relatives, but we can choose who we love, and in that way, we can absolutely choose who we call family.