Family is sipping hot chocolate in a cozy condo, looking out at a raging snowstorm. It’s hauling a mini Christmas tree up to the mountains for the holidays, playing blackjack with my dad, reading Harry Potter with my mom, learning to play softball with my sister. Family is birthday cakes for the dog, pumpkin shopping on chilly autumn evenings, building Lego R2D2’s and Ferris wheels.
When I think of the word family, these scenes filter through my mind like a jumbled slideshow of my childhood. As I began to talk to other Stanford students about what this word meant to them, it was clear that similar memories were brought up for each of them: Family dinners spent laughing and talking, surprise parties gone bad, vacations to exotic or not-so-exotic destinations. Something about this word seems to bring up a multitude of emotions in many of us: Happiness, nostalgia — perhaps even exasperation — but mostly love. Family, it seems, is above all the people in our lives who love us deeply and for whom we would do anything.
A common phrase many people brought up in association with the word family was “unconditional love”—the idea that our families are the ones who love us fully and without judgment — the people we can be our unabashed selves with. This was an interesting trend to me, not because it was unexpected, but because of the implications this association had on other relationships. Using the definition of family as only our immediate relatives, I wondered if by defining those relationships around unconditionality, it meant other loving relationships involved more judgment and self-censorship.
To me, all love is unconditional. We love people because of, and not despite, their flaws. This, for me, has led to deeper and more meaningful connections with those in my life. Two of my favorite spoken word poets, Phil and Sarah Kay, have a line in their poem “An Origin Story,” which goes, “I have seen the best of you, and the worst of you, and I choose both.” This line, to me, epitomizes what love truly is: Fully embracing the people in your life for who they are and allowing them to be that without imposing your own ideas on them about who they should be. This kind of love certainly exists in many families, but I would argue it should also exist in any caring relationship.
However, the concept of “family” can be more broadly defined than just one’s immediate relatives. As some of my peers expressed, family is more nuanced than this simple definition. “Family” could be everything from our immediate family to our close friends to our pets. One student even talked about a high school teacher whom he still considers “family.” Clearly, everyone’s perception of this term is slightly different. But our reactions when we hear this word or try to describe what it means to us are fairly universal. As each person I talked to began discussing their family, they’d invariably begin to smile, their voices would gain volume, and some people would even start gesturing wildly to illustrate what they were talking about.
So perhaps “family” can be anything from our immediate relatives or our close friends to even a particular feeling of warmth and lightness we get from our vivid memories of important people in our life. This flexibility in definition is very beautiful because it allows us to keep our family with us wherever we are. One of the exciting things about being at Stanford is that our definitions of family can constantly expand to incorporate new people. While we may always have a conception of family outside of our life here, it’s comforting to know that this definition can morph and change as we meet new people in life.
Contact Julie Plummer at jplummer ‘at’ stanford.edu.