(en) family 100
Personally, I probably can’t love anyone who isn’t my family. Math logic dictates that it means I consider the people I love as family. But then again, it’s not much of a condition. I just have to consider someone as family if I want to love them. Whoa, what? Huh? I’m starting to confuse myself.
Hold on, what is family anyway?
There was a discussion regarding this when I was studying abroad. I’m a simple-minded goblin, so to me, family equals my parents and siblings. Then this question comes up: “can, for example, for a friend to be regarded as family?”
No. I don’t think so. Friend is friend, family is family. It’s not the same.
But isn’t that what marriage is for a lot of people? To take in a stranger you knew for a long time—a friend—and make them family. Your family. Do I… will I feel so too? I guess I’ll never know until I marry someone myself.
Regardless, at least to me, water of the womb is thicker than blood of the covenant.
Yet, not everyone makes the line so clear like I do regarding this. A classmate said “yes” to the aforementioned question, after all. I don’t remember the specifics, but I kinda remember her saying, “I’ll probably think of them as family if I live together with them, even if unrelated by blood.” Right. Family are the people you live with, that makes sense. But as a person who’s lived by himself in a different country for a year-ish, family don’t stop being family even when you’re apart, so residence isn’t a deciding factor.
Well, whatever… the point of the discussion wasn’t to deblur and decide what a family is, but to point to the fact that there’s not only one kind of “family” out there. Parents with their kids… stepsiblings… or even a bunch of friends living together. They’re all family if they make it to be one.
But… family isn’t mere concept. It’s also something concrete, something that exists in form, at least in society. You have certificates to prove it and stuff.
Which reminds me to one of the most… questionable manga I’ve read the past year: Shachiku to Shoujo no 1800-nichi.
The manga tells about a middle school girl that was left behind by her mother and an acquaintance of her mother was pushed into taking her into his home. The two made the best of that sad situation and started opening up and supporting each other. For the short time they were together, they were a family.
But unlike stepsiblings or adoptive relationships, you can’t put an unrelated adult man and a middle school girl in the same house without the social services knocking on your door. The girl had to lie and pretend to her school that she was living with a relative. I get that the system is designed to protect minors, but on this particular scenario, I feel it backfiring and making it worse for the party involved. To spoiler a part of the story, the girl had to live in an institution for a time, and was only able to return after the guy’s friend exploited a loophole by “adopting” the girl.
To spoiler the more integral part of the manga even more, this middle school girl-and-man family stops being what I consider a family. The guy does his best to become a father figure to the girl, but the girl can’t help falling in love with his supposed father figure.
At first, I don’t approve of this development. I adore stories when it’s about a single parent raising their child, so I don’t want it devolving into a romance. But I’m just a reader so the story just goes in its direction anyway. Now that the girl is a full-fledged adult, they don’t have to deal with the whole social-services-knocking-on-your-door thing, but still, their age gap is a weird sight to see for other people. But they’re firm. They’ve come that far for their own concept of family, and now they’ll just do the same with their concept of a couple.
So, as per the discussion I had in class… I guess there’s a hundred kinds of families and couples out there. Maybe more.