Unrelated Family

Sometimes I don't really think we are that far removed from tribal days. This has good and bad connotations. One of the good ones, in my opinion, has to do with community based mentalities. If you've taken a grade school history course, you have probably been taught about communities in which children are raised not only by their personal nuclear family, but the extended family, friends, and the community itself. There is a generally held belief that this kind of education and community has dissolved in progress, the shrinking of the nuclear family, the advent of suburbs and urban sprawl.

To a certain extent, I understand, accept, and agree with this sentiment. However, while familial ties outside the nuclear family have become more transitory. This is necessarily so since people have the ability to be more transitory. As a result of technology that has stripped a trip across the world down to 18 hours rather than 18 years. The side effect of this transitory nature is that familial connections in this modern world can evaporate and also manifest at any point.

There are two sides to this coin. It means that you could be inculcated in a family that does not your blood; which is good. It also means that because of many different reasons other than death, you could lose that new family. It's painful. A pain that probably wasn't felt in the same way back when community was necessarily prized so highly.

The only good result of losing a gained family is that you are forced to rely on others that you may have forgotten about and also make connections to new ones. Nothing ever replaces the loss of a family, but it certainly gives you the strength to overcome it.