I live in a blended family. I share no one's actual blood running through my veins at the Christmas table, other than my biological father and my two biological children.
There are times when I'm in the room with all of my family, connected only by the geographic and detached from the traditional.
We don't share the same childhood memories. The names of aunts and uncles, street addresses, and holiday scenes are all different for each of us, because our pasts are just that: different.
If I choose to live in that past--refusing change and growth--then I choose to close my heart to the new and to the birth of possibility, but I never liked people like that; people who live in the stagnant.
I will tell you that it's hard, and sometimes it's downright awkward. I try too hard to fit in, and I fall around my words and efforts to join what should be natural in the family home. But I know that it's difficult for them as well, because tucked inside their memories, there's hurt. When my father was physically and emotionally present in the room, theirs wasn't. I heard my father say he was proud of me, but I don't think they ever did.
I am beyond thankful for the father that lived in my home. He always let my sister and I know that we were his, and that being his child meant something. I know that he loves me, and that I don't have to fight for his attention, because I've always had it.
So I choose to share it.
Because being a Daddy's girl is the most satisfying feeling in the world. I have felt it on earth as I have lived in the shadow of a father who has always been worth the adoring. What a wretch I would be to keep another from drawing from this joy-well!
I realize there will be some who refuse the journey-who still struggle against the hurt-but I choose love. And I choose them because I choose family, whatever that looks like.
This life is meant to be shared. In the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, God said, "Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth". I believe He said this because He wanted more than just a family of four at His thankful table; He wanted a blended family.
