Family Matters

What is a family? According to my 1969 ‘Pocket Oxford English Dictionary’ (Miss Oblique #2 says I’m the only person who still uses a dictionary) a family is “parents, children, servants &c., forming household”.

I talked to the servants about ths. Predictably the response was “if you say so, Sir”.

To be fair, the dictionary does go on to give variations, and ‘The Collins Dictionary and Thesaurus’ (1987) gives nine separate definitions.

Some of these are dubious: “a household” sounds just like a collection of people living in the same house. To me, a family is more than that; and it is more than the frequent references to “offspring”. (Remember however that these are not modern dictionaries.)

We regularly watch ‘EastEnders’ (BBC1). Yes, really. It has a surprisingly high standard of acting and plotting. One recurring theme is BLOOD. That is, family ties, which must here mean DNA ties. This is an example of a commonly held belief that blood is everything. Here I have an issue.

To my continued surprise, I find myself in a decidely non-traditional family. Yes, Mrs O. and I are at the centre of it; but our children are all adopted, with four different birth fathers and three different birth mothers between them (it’s complicated) and we have one grandchild, fathered by a sperm donor. In fact our WhatsApp group is titled ‘(Oblique) by Blood, Marriage or Paperwork’. It includes a daughter’s partner (they have been together longer than many married couples) and his single parent mother.

So what makes this a family? At its simplest, I suppose you would say love. Which comes in a variety of forms, of course. Our family started with romantic love; then came parental love. Now it includes what you might even call love by association.

I don’t know what it is to experience genetic parental love. I never will. It’s hard to believe it could be stronger than my love for my children (and of now, of course, my grandchild).

We sometimes, morbidly, speculate on what investigators would find if we were all killed in a plane crash or the like. The DNA evidence would be very puzzling.

Having grown up in a traditional nuclear family, with two parents and two children, I have ended up in a modern family, tied by “Blood, Marriage or Paperwork”. It’s wonderful.

I can only speculate on other families. Two mothers, two fathers, single parents, adopted…. Just wandered in off the street and never left? What does it matter, if the family loves and cares for each other?

It is quite by chance that I am writing this on Father’s Day….