FAMILY OR BELONGING.

As regular readers of my stories know, I have no time for a Brisbane doctor who claimed that men and women can never be just friends, other than to deconstruct his ramblings. Now, for another one, he says that you need a family to be happy.

So, what is family? Is it a blood connection? Is it marriage? Is it people around you? Is it animals? Well, family can be whatever you want it to be, as long as it involves people who feel the same. It can even involve animals.

One should not make one’s goal in life to be to have a partner and a family of their own, meaning kids. For some people, family might be themselves, no partner, no kids and a dog and a cat, with the dog sleeping on one side of you in the bed and the cat on the other side of you. Some people also find that groups they belong to are like family. I remember a guy I knew from school, and later university, who told me that he belonged to a medieval recreation society and they were like family. Despite all their jousting and other activities, they all got together over a Strongbow and a meal and chatted and knew enough about each other.

Some people speak of their family of friends, with people they catch up with regularly for coffee and a chat. They may be people they’ve known from school.

For some people, biological family may have been abusive, violent or dysfunctional. For some, their notion of family might have been a revolving door of orphanages and foster families, never really having a home. And for some, they choose not to have kids for this reason.

It’s not a biological family that you need to make you happy but a sense of belonging to a group, tribe (the autistic tribe is a type of family) or society. And family is not always biological.