The remarkable thing about my taking Jake to visit my sister-in-law "Aunt Minnie" last weekend was that it seemed so very unremarkable to me.
Mike, you see, had brilliantly realized that even if three of us couldn't travel to Napa for three days to attend a wedding I had, quite frankly, been dying to attend, he could go without me and Jake. The bride, after all, was the sister of one of his closest friends, and Mike knew his support would be appreciated.
Never mind that this same friend had been the officiant at our wedding, imbuing me, I felt, with a legitimate claim to lend my support to him as he gave away his sister in this one. Never mind that I quite love his sister myself and am truly, deeply thrilled for her. Never mind that I love a wedding in the same unabashed way I love a good romantic comedy—getting dressed up, feeling pretty, dancing with my husband, ending up all teary and thankful when the couple says their vows. And never mind that—to twist the knife a little deeper —the wedding was at the Culinary Institute at Greystone, for crying out loud, and the bride knows how to put on a party.
Never mind all that. I'm a mother, and one who knows better than to believe a 20-month-old would willingly travel a total of 5,000 miles in the space of three days to be left in a strange hotel room with a strange sitter while his parents yuck it up at a big, once-in-a-lifetime party. My job, plainly, was to stay home with him.
My first thought—if you start counting after the many less than charitable thoughts that went through my head as I sweetly agreed with Mike that he should go on his own—was where I could go with Jake that would feel like a getaway and not like three times as much work as staying at home.
It's not that I was scared to stay home for a weekend alone with my child, really. It's just that the thought seemed so ... exhausting. And if Mike was having fun, shouldn't we as well?
And so I thought of Aunt Minnie. She and her family live about a four-hour drive away in West Virginia. Manageable, especially if I could count on a two-plus-hour nap from Jake along the way. We haven't been to see her since October. And, best of all, she has an eleven-year-old daughter who both adores Jake and is itching to start babysitting. Suddenly, Lewisburg, West Virginia, was looking as relaxing and resort-like as Cabo San Lucas.
Truly, it didn't once cross my mind that going to see Aunt Minnie without Mike would make him jealous. I didn't even think about, say, sticking it to him like he was sticking it to me by going to a fabulous wedding in Napa without me. And, perhaps most to the point, I didn't think I needed him along to visit myself.
Which means it didn't seem at all remarkable that I was going to visit my sister-in-law without her brother. Which, as I mentioned, is actually quite remarkable.
What Is a Family?
I really have no sense whether there is anything unusual or momentous about a realtive-by-marriage visiting family without the tie that binds her to it. Probably because I never followed a proper course of What Is a Family? study.
My experience of family, you see, consists of two parents who moved to California precisely to get as far away from their families as possible. I grew up with the standard yearly visits from grandparents and the occasional Christmas in a cold, snowy place we had to go because of family—until I was seven and my parents figured out that if they took us on vacations to locations with beaches during winter break they could avoid the whole family-gathering-in-a-cold-place thing entirely. For a few pre-teen years my sister and I traveled alone to visit our grandparents. And in law school I saw my grandmother, who lived a long subway ride away, with reasonable frequency.
But longing to spend time with family? Missing them within a month of the last visit? Calling weekly? Moving to Asheville, North Carolina, of all places, to be closer to them?
Not within my ability to comprehend.
Which is why I continue to marvel at how little thought it took to decide I would take Jake to visit Aunt Minnie:
No thought of obligations. No thought of it being the "right" thing to do. No thought of the awkwardness that arises when you think too hard about how you ended up related to this person you had only met a few times before the wedding. Nothing but a true desire to spend time there.
Okay, this was a particularly easy call. Aunt Minnie is an easy person to love, and not just because she is particularly close to Mike and therefore was predisposed to love me soon after he decided he did. She is welcoming and comfortable, and I feel like we bonded in a particularly special way when she visited us in Long Beach when Jake was six weeks old.
During those days we spent together, I let go of the picture I had of the big sister who could do no wrong, whose every cool design influence doubly influenced my husband and left me feeling style-less and pushed aside, who was, as I understood it, the Queen of both Breastfeeding and Mothering. Here I was, struggling to breastfeed my infant and feeling incredibly guilty about the big, ugly, battery-operated swing adorning our living room floor because, surely, Aunt Minnie wouldn't have put one of her babies in one.
Actually, she assured me, she would and she had.
And a sisterhood was born alongside my new motherhood.
Still, even if Aunt Minnie is an easy case of family-making, the question remains: What is it that makes a family?
I don't mean this in a Moral Majority, abstinence-only-teaching-teen-pregnancy-and-forced-marriage way. Nor in a "the Bible says marriage means a man and a woman" way. And not even in a strictly legal, we-have-this-piece-of-paper way where you marry someone and, as a consequence, you marry his family.
I don't mean any of this because, for example, I have a sister whom I didn't acquire through birth or ceremony or law or even some kind of feminist consciousness-raising organization. Kali, whom I've mentioned before, is my sister because, well, she's my sister. (Read about our sisterhood in The Friendship That Doesn't Change When Your Do.)
And, frankly, Mike became my life partner well before the fabulous party we threw on August 14, 2004 at the Hotel Bel Air. (He is cringing that I mention the location because it sounds so snooty, but it really was a fabulous party, and that's where it took place.)
And while Aunt Minnie's family bonds are certainly in part the result of my marriage certificate and my son who is also her brother's son, there is something more to it than that.
It's not so much that we choose our families, although I'm all for it if someone wants to. It's that something happens, some shared energy intertwines, and you feel like some other person shares a part of you, is there to support you, knows you in ways you might not even know yourself.
Childbirth, ironically, is the easiest way to make a family. Which is perhaps why I think it's worth contemplating how we create families in other ways.
Letting and Reaching
In yoga terms, I see the process of family-building as a particularly strong and beautiful example of what happens when you develop a strong core of love for yourself and then reach into the energy of the Universe around you to see where that love takes you.
Corny as it sounds, I didn't find Mike until I acknowledged that I might never find Mike and, better yet, that I was okay with it. I let go of my conviction that if I wasn't married by the time I was 35, dammit, I'd have a baby on my own. Because, I realized just shy of my 36th birthday, I didn't need a baby to create the family I was searching for. I had my beloved basset hound, Roxanne. I had friends I could count on. And, best of all, since discovering yoga, I was discovering a love for myself that was as nurturing as the love of any other person.
So of course I met Mike. Because I took all that love growing in my heart and sent it outward. Partly in the form of teaching yoga, which allowed it, conveniently enough, to land right at the feet of the tall, cute new student who showed up for class one December evening.
So, okay, I have this syrup-y, isn't-yoga-wonderful brochure to hand out when advertising the benefits of opening your heart, following your heart, sending the peace and beauty within your heart into a world so desperately in need of both.
But isn't this what happens every time we find a friend who turns out to be like family? Something in them touches something in you, something you can't put words to, some energy that just exists. You just get each other.
And doesn't that friend sometimes turn out to be non-platonic? Or maybe someone you happen to know because they are related to the person you have chosen as your partner?
In other words, whether we label the person a friend or a life-partner, a spouse or a sister-in-law, whether the world labels her family or not, the relationship comes from the same place.
Your heart.
And maybe, in the end, that's how you make a family. By opening your heart and seeing where it leads you.
Navasana—Boat Pose: Steadying the Core and Reaching Out
I thought of navasana, or boat pose, here because it seems to me that family both is and grows from a deep, strong core, or foundation. On the one hand, we often think of family as our foundation, that unshakable institution many people feel they can return to whenever times are hard. People who will always be there for you. A safe place in a cold world.
But, at the same time, the only way a family grows that strong is if you have a strong foundation yourself. The stronger your core—the more you believe in the beauty of your own heart—the more willing you are to reach out of it, to open your heart, to make yourself vulnerable. And the readier you are to accept someone else's love in return.
So I offer you navasana to both strengthen your own core so you can continue to reach out with your love and to receive love from the Universe, and, as well, to remind you, as you sit proud and strong in this pose, that you have all the love you need in yourself.
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