The Thank-You Project by Nancy Davis Kho

Author:Nancy Davis Kho
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2019-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

Not-Related-by-Blood Family

A final word as we come to the end of the people in your family to whom you may want to send a letter: no one says family must be defined by genetics.

While the categories I’ve outlined above all follow the traditional classifications of family, we thankfully live in a time when any given person’s definition of family may be much broader. Maybe your family tree is more like a quaking aspen, which grows in a forest of single trees, all with an interconnected underground root system.

I would venture to say that if you are someone who has deliberately created a support network of not-related-by-blood family, you may have even more to be thankful for than the average bear. Something drove you to identify and cast your lot with the members of your chosen family, and something in them makes you treasure their presence in your life. Those people deserve to know.

Godchildren. Foster parents. The not-related “grandma” who never forgets your birthday or one of your sporting events, the father figure who taught you to shave and tie a proper Windsor knot after your own dad disappeared, your child’s friend who basically lives in your home and looks to you for parental mooring because her own family is in disarray—you may not share DNA, but that has scant bearing on whether you’re family or not.

In fact, I’ll even go out on a limb here (get it?) and encourage you to include pets on this part of the list. A lot of us have gained more comfort and understanding from the four-legged/feathered/reptilian creatures in our lives than we have from the ones who walk upright, have a credit rating, and carry a cell phone. If you’ve been helped, shaped, or inspired by the animals in your life, you could write about that.

Thanks to my brother Larry, who was basically an underage Marlin Perkins, I grew up in a house full of dogs, lizards, gerbils, fish, turtles, and an iguana named Spike. But the pet of my life was a German shorthaired pointer named Achilles, whom we adopted when the girls were five and eight, and with whom we got to spend eight excellent years. I adored him.

If you know the breed, you know they have two speeds: spastic motion and Velcro’d to their owner’s leg. Every single day we had him, Achilles made sure I was up and out of my chair for a big midday walk, rather than hunched over my desk writing and courting spinal pain. He greeted my every appearance in a room like he was the prepubescent president of the Nancy Davis Kho Fan Club, complete with hyperventilation and tripping over his own feet in excitement. He drove me batty with his occasional need to eat grass in the front yard for an hour at two a.m., his counter-surfing thievery that claimed both an entire chicken and an entire corned beef, and his insistence on being exactly where I was trying to go, 0.03 seconds before I got there.

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