A Family Tree Worthy Of The Love We Put Into It

“The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.”

RICHARD DAVID BACH

I am about to become a grandmother to a child with whom I share absolutely no DNA.  As much as I have been interested in the cultural, ethnic, and genealogical lineage of who has come before me in my family tree, and I sometimes dream of what my children’s, children’s, children may be like, the lack of genetic connection I have to this little girl is absolutely irrelevant to me.  She is my granddaughter.  I am her grandmother.  We are family.  We haven’t even met.

Many little girls dream of the person they will marry and the family they will have, and I was no different. I always imagined creating a family of my own, beyond my parents and siblings.  I saw a spouse.  By the time I met my future spouse, I saw children.  It all mattered a great deal to me.

But what I learned over many years, was that the WAY I would grow my family wouldn’t matter AT ALL.  NOT. ONE. BIT.  In reality, my family goes far beyond the little world I imagined as a child.

Each of us has a family tree that grows out of a lifelong series of our choices and from what happens to us.  Its expansive branches are spread in varying and unexpected directions because of what may have seemed like chance, but in retrospect was perhaps fate.  It sways and takes turns over time, the result of ever-changing relationships and friendships.  A branch or entire span of the family tree is sometimes dramatically altered by marriages, divorces, and deaths.  

Because of the imperfections and difficulties of life, family trees are sometimes ravaged, as if they were in a storm that left them damaged and broken.  During these adversities, families must forever be changing and evolving as life unfolds.  As with nature, our family tree can recover from the harshness of life, and grow stronger, wider, and taller as a result of the work we do to keep our families strong.

My family tree hasn’t been all that I thought it would be, but it certainly has become what I needed, what God planned for me, and it has enriched my life in unexpected ways.  We continue to learn and grow, heal from damage and losses, and build up stronger.  I’ve learned that my family is most successful and happy when each individual is actively nurturing their own personal healthy growth and together we build resilience that helps us all weather the difficulties that must be faced.

Following a childhood as part of a loving family, teenage years filled with laughter, insecurity, and a broken heart, and some painful relationships and life lessons learned in my early twenties, the family that I imagined for my future was planned to include a husband and five children.  Yes, my picket fence vision included a clapboard farmhouse with a wrap-around porch and carefully placed steps taken in my life that would help me avoid disappointment and pain, and would include a busy house full of happiness.  The homestead would be a decades-long home base for our children, their friends, and eventually, our grandchildren.  So much for “family planning” – my young sapling of a family tree was going to grow much differently than I had imagined.

“Together in our house, in the firelight, we are the world made small.”

Jennifer Donnelly

With my future husband and life partner found sooner than expected at age 22, we married and became a family when I was 26.  It was early in our marriage that we experienced infertility and the first, painful splinter in our new family tree.  We were faced with having very real conversations about remaining childless, adoption, fostering, and the rigors of infertility treatments.  This was when I discovered that my husband didn’t want to pursue foster care or adoption, options of family-building that I had always been interested in but had perhaps been too quiet about sharing my thoughts on.  It was a frightening time in our lives when these issues were rarely discussed and there was little guidance or professional support.

We made sacrifices and difficult decisions, and over the first ten years of our marriage, we grew a family that included the two of us, the birth of three children, and the adoption of a dog and a cat!  It was not quite what either of us had envisioned but the experience taught us that our family is always changing and never quite “complete”.

Over the next ten years, the family tree we were growing changed in unique ways.  Early on, we experienced new relationships with children through the Big Brothers/Big Sisters programs.  It opened our hearts to other ways to welcome children into our family life.  We added to our clan with the summer-long hosting of an international orphan whom we helped find a forever family through adoption.  We also hosted three international students, from Mexico and Spain, each for a school year.   These experiences taught us how enriched a family can be by welcoming unexpected or less traditional members to our family, even if it was only for a season of life.

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Over decades we rescued more pets that needed families,  each with its own unique needs and differences.  Some of our pets remained in our family for many years, and others were fleeting.  Each pet family member taught us that we have much to give to others in need, but that the love that is returned can be immeasurable and unceasing.

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Among our extended family, there are longtime members welcomed through adoption that occurred in a time and place where this form of “family building” was done quietly and seldom discussed.  By the time our children arrived, it had been a part of the fabric of our extended family, and so our young children thought nothing of it, perhaps not even being aware of it.  It was a matter-of-fact existence that beautifully eroded any ideas about what a family must look like.  With each addition to our widening branches, our family tree grew stronger roots and more lovely with each passing year.

“Take away all our possessions, and we are left with one structure held together by love: family.”

ANONYMOUS

As life is known to be difficult, there were divorces, deaths, and remarriages along the way that caused the growth of new branches in our family tree and further blended what our family looked like.  It was many, many years before my children even understood that their paternal grandfather was technically their “step-grandfather”, as my husband’s parents were long divorced, his mother, long remarried, and his father, deceased years before we ever married.

“Pop” loved all of his grandchildren immeasurably, and they felt that love.  He had never had any biological children, yet enjoyed the gift of grandparenting without any worry about the history of life and how he arrived into this important role.  All five of his grandchildren benefitted greatly from this little twist in our family tree branch – and it secretly taught me important future lessons for my life to come.

Expanding our inner family circle, there were “Uncle Jerry” and “Uncle John” who were two members related to us only through the lifelong friendships formed between their dad and his best friends.  “Uncle Jerry also became a Godparent to our son, adding another layer to the importance of the connection and the love that is shared between family members.  It was many years into their childhoods before any of them asked us one day – “How is Uncle Jerry our uncle, actually”?  This innocence of acceptance into our family was an important personification of the expansive definition of family.

Still, other family members spring up from quite unexpected places.  In our family’s experience, the hiring of a part-time nanny turned into such a special relationship, that “our Bonnie” became a Godparent to our youngest child, a bonus mother to me, and her family tree branches became lovingly entangled with ours, celebrating shared holidays, attending birthday parties and visiting each other long after decades and miles had separated us.  

These are perhaps the best examples of how we are fated to be in certain people’s lives, and making them a part of each other’s families is a blessed gift that enriches all of our lives.

Our family was most significantly and forcibly changed upon the death of my husband.  That one tragic and sudden loss ended a marriage, broke innumerable hearts, and in many ways, tore away our community, our friends, and half of our family.  Some of the changes were permanent, and some were temporary, but not one family relationship was left untouched, unharmed.  This experience was a lesson in the more painful part of how Mother Nature can alter the very roots of a family tree as it grows, bringing it to the brink of death.

During those most difficult years, the changes we faced were seemingly relentless as I held my core family – my three children – as close as our broken hearts could muster.  We struggled individually and collectively.  We moved back to my home state.  I changed my work more than once.  The kids changed schools more than once.  We all lost and made friends.  We just held on tight for about ten years before the dust seemed to slowly settle on our family. 

It was during this time, after 4½ years of parenting on my own, I remarried and immediately faced building up another significant change – adding a loving husband, three “bonus” children, and an entirely new set of in-laws, relatives, and friends to my storm-ravaged family tree.

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So here I am, 56 years into my family life.  I am a member of the Holmstrom-Zanis-Schmidt family, which is a part of the larger and ever-changing Heming-Mitchell-Pillo-Fyhr-Fischer-Magee-Tress families.  At times, we sprinkled in many others – some Piscitelli-Simmons-Wajert-Fernandez-Peniche-Tepe-Leonard-Lazovi-Spieles-Rohlfs members among them.  Top it all off with love, caring, and years of relationships that are coming, growing, and going, and we end up with a family tree that has survived and thrived through the best and worst that life throws at us. 

How it looks doesn’t matter.  How you name it doesn’t matter.  Even the duration of their stay in our family doesn’t matter.  Certainly, the DNA doesn’t matter.  Some we inherit, some we choose, and some we are fated to enjoin.  Ultimately, how we got here doesn’t matter.  All that matters is the work we put into our family tree every day.  It is our effort, the love and care we share.  We must nurture our tree with water and sun over time and it will grow larger and stronger and more beautifully rich.

May my granddaughter, the daughter of my oldest bonus daughter and son-in-love, and all grandchildren that I may be blessed with beyond today, know the tremendous love of their family.  May they feel welcomed and wanted unconditionally throughout their lives, as their own family tree grows from the humble origins of their parents.  May they learn that family is certainly what you are given at birth and grows imperfectly as life unfolds, but that what matters most is the love within.   I love my family tree and welcome the gift of my new granddaughter to sit and nest among its branches.

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.

George Bernard Shaw

Safe travels, and go hug a (family) tree!

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