Family can be a wonderful thing. For most people it’s their first community, their first support system. Family shapes our core beliefs, and even the people we become.

Family can also be our first loss, our first betrayal. Sometimes we lose the memories of our early experiences with family, for good reason.

Luckily, our birth family is not our only family. It isn’t even necessarily our closest family. We can create our own families, through partnership, marriage, and friendship. We can create our support systems, our cheerleaders, our group of people who love us, and who we love, despite everything.

We can choose our families.

I hope these affirmations remind us of why we have our families, and bring our families closer, in whatever way those families came to be.