04/03/2024 – “No road is long with good company” [Turkish proverb]

I post today from Boseman, Montana. This is our first stop in our leisurely drive down to Atlanta, which was Carey’s US hometown for a couple of decades and remains home to many family members – both blood and found/chosen.

Boseman is not simply a town 500 miles from Calgary to overnight. Boseman is a destination: Carey wants a burger, a Ted’s Montana Grill burger, https://www.tedsmontanagrill.com/. It’s a thing. Burger accomplished (dare I say “relished”?) yesterday, we are off to Casper, Wyoming, today.

I know most people use the phrase “chosen family” (attributed to Katherine Wilson’s 1991 paper, “Families we choose: Lesbian, Gays, Kinship”). I respect the relationships that term describes. I use “found family”. I am a hetero-, cis-female. As a writer, I like the alliteration. I also recognise that, in my life, the intentionality of choosing is less important than the accident of meeting.

I started making a list here: “brothers”, “sisters”, “cousins” - all the family I found in a lifetime of traveling. After a few minutes, I realised I couldn’t really stop adding names.

The more I think, the blurrier the distinction between “family” and “friend” becomes. Put simply, I have just met so many wonderful people. There were cruel, hurtful, manipulative people, even those for whom the word “evil” is proper. Thankfully, I can count them on my fingers. Even so, not all the amazing people are (are yet, or are still) my “found family”.

Some of it is simple duration. The journey of kinship takes time, although there are exceptions. Carey has long, mindfully curated his “family”. To my delight, I have been adopted into his thriving network of blood and found family.

Some were situational/seasonal relationships that ended naturally. Some never reached the “necessary” level of intimacy. Some I failed to nurture. Some I spoiled.

Some, I feel I lack the right to “claim”. To me, the term “found family” speaks of an inherent symmetry – of accident, effort, affection. I worry about projecting and, hence, overstepping, and that the term “chosen family” could reflect an imposition on one side.

I have always had a preponderance of lop-sided relationships in my life, which is proper. I want to put more into the world than I take out. And it makes the balanced ones so special. Mutuality, give and take, across time, space and location is such a gift.

The use of the word “family” in this post is inherently positive. That is not always the case in familial relationships. The function of the phrase “found/chosen family” is its positivity, creating a supportive network, even if (or particularly when) blood relatives are unsupportive (or worse). There is an element of intent within “family” in this sense, which “chosen” properly expresses. But, for me, most striking is the succession of happy accidents and other people’s commitment that has created this global group to which I am so grateful to belong.

You know who you are. Thank you.