Shine ON

What is it with family?  What makes a family? Is it that first moment when you hold a living being in your hands.....feel the warmth.....feel the heartbeat.....smell the smell that belongs somehow to you and all the ancestors before you?

I've got family I've given birth to, family I've married, family I've married into, family I've just adopted as my own though no blood is shared between  us.  Family is first....family is what leads us home whether that home is our place of infancy or our exit from the family of origin.

My family is my husband, my son, my wee son, my little daughter, my darling behemoth dog, my two pathetically spoiled cats and my over indulged trip of goats. All of us live....contentedly so it would seem......within just under four acres in a wee spot of paradise on Vancouver Island. 

I think of the family I came from and the words and emotion only arrive now.....in the wee hours of a Saturday night merging into a Sunday morning......after I've had a few cocktails and watched 'Skyfall' on PPV and my mind is finally at some type of ease.  What a pity that peace of mind is met at 2:35 am.  What a pity it takes such a lead up to find myself settling into.....ME. 

Babies mean family.  Surely they do.  My babies have made me part of a family starting with my first when I was 26 and on my own.....no daddy to-be rubbing my belly at pre-natal classes....no excited Grandma knitting booties and shopping for strollers.  My first baby completed my family of two.....a 'just-me-and- you' kinda gig.  My parents didn't really groove on the no husband thing.....and rightfully so who the hell could blame them for their worry......and so I felt truly alone.  Alone with my belly, my pregnancy books, my lower back ache, my sore feet, my cravings for bananas. 

My friends surrounded me. My friends that formed what would become my new family enveloped me then......reached out their hands.....opened their arms......welcomed me into their respective folds.  And my baby son was born and I was overwhelmed at how I felt....how the world all of a sudden made sense where before it just....had not.

Critters show up on this property we call home for our herd, our family, our trip, our gaggle, our flock.  The deer come right up to the deer fence and nibble politely and delicately on the tips of my forsythia.  They look at me intently after our eyes meet on a May afternoon.  A doe looks at me, pausing from her grazing of my back four, her huge mousy ears pricked forward, every muscle on her fawn-coloured body holding still......staring at me as though daring me to question why I'm even here at all.

My three goats 'maaa-aaaaa' to this doe and her buck that follows silently behind and the dynamic between domesticated and wild hooved mammal is tested and tried.  The wild buck curls his top lip back in the universal language of hooved-folk dominance. 

My deer are dear to me.  They are my family.  Family.  Family made from scratch.

Just around the bend shines a light.....the light around the corner waiting for me.  Waiting for me and mine to warm our faces in the warmth.  The light of a family garden, a family gathering, a family Christmas tree.....the light of more than one generation gathering together to raise one another, to carry one another, to support one another, through the dark spots on the track.....the old guiding the young to the light. 

We are the old....my husband and I.....we are the old guiding the young.  Forsaking our families of origin....his through death and mine through estrangement......yet forging ahead anyway to ensure our children carry on and around that corner to stand in the light.....and SHINE. 

Shine it all around my children......xo