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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1YtNGEK:
ineptshieldmaid:
bomberqueen17:
ineptshieldmaid replied to your post:magickedteacup reblogged your post and added: …
Those would be your metasorores! (Borrowing the logic from the poly term metamor, used to describe the lover of one’s lover, or, broadly speaking, the connections beyond one’s love. Horrible greek-latin combo also borrowed from said discourse.)
I love this idea. Metasorores! Welcome to the Metasorority, I say beatifically to the woman who introduced my little sister to her husband, who has my niece as the beneficiary of her retirement plan because she has no blood descendants, to the woman who was told my niece-to-be’s name before I was; you have been assimilated into the [our maiden name] Sisterhood Collective, I will now tag you in everything I post on Facebook about the niece. (Actually she’s mega-rad; she drove from Chicago straight to the farm in one long overnight go, and got out of her car and washed her hands and borrowed a pair of rubber boots and dove straight into delunging turkeys with me, the first time we met [well, we might have met at the wedding but i don’t remember because I’d just driven overnight *to* Illinois and washed my hands and set to work setting tables, so it’s kind of a theme and that wedding’s mostly a blur and I don’t think I drank at all], and we spent six hours replacing the word “love” in every song with the word “lungs” or “blood” because it was funny. Look for our upcoming album on iTunes.)
I have metasorores I don’t know that well, too– the woman who lives near my isolated sister in Georgia and swaps babysitting with her and keeps her alive when none of us can make it down there, or her former college roommate who was sort of nasty to me but that doesn’t particularly matter, we don’t always like the people we are bound to, and she loves my sister and that is important and necessary.
The regular-sorores are kind of on the same page though, I get parenting advice for my non-blood sister all the time as she struggles with her kids, and both my sisters with children have begun writing her letters and exchanging parenting books with her.
Oh I guess there’s another of my underpinning themes, I really like stories about complex non-nuclear non-blood families.
Oh I guess there’s another of my underpinning themes, I really like stories about complex non-nuclear non-blood families.
You and me both, buddy.
*stares at post* I like this post, it is a good post. I’m sure I have seen people talk about blood family and chosen family as intersecting and interacting, before today, but I can’t think of any such examples. I have known many people who feel no one will understand you like family / blood above all / etc; I know many people who are vehemently pro chosen-family, but everyone I know who does actually successfully merge the two usually picks one to talk about as their preferred value system.
I feel like I don’t see a lot of people discuss that kind of blending either? It could be that those who don’t have close blood families sort of avoid it, and those who do don’t see the need?
I think my family is a little unusual because we’re very close but went through a fairly comprehensive period of geographic separation. My father had a close-knit, really big family that scattered to the winds, and never reunited– we see one of his sisters sometimes, but the other two are more remote, including one in Norway, and his brother has an abusive wife who has isolated him, so we haven’t seen him in a decade maybe. But my sisters and I went our separate ways and then tried to come back. One is still far– Georgia’s 1600 miles away– but the others came back from Illinois and Colorado and now live within 15 miles of our parents.
So we had to pursue non-blood closeness if we wanted to live in the style we’d been accustomed to. (One of my non-blood sisters said that she missed me every vacation in high school because I never came around, because I could get what I needed at home, and it’s true, I didn’t really need other playmates. She was the one to track me down after high school, and hold me close; I don’t know that it would have occurred to me to do so. I would be very lonely if she hadn’t, though.)
There is a divide, I think, where people who have mostly known blood-close relationships insist that’s a necessary component, and those who haven’t, or who haven’t had it be non-toxic anyway, insist that it’s not. I do know I sort of expected at least one of my sisters might feel this way, and was a little surprised to find that wasn’t the case! All three of them agreed that they had other relationships just as close as family.
So anyway. If anyone has never had close blood family in a non-toxic way I’m here to tell you that it’s totally bullshit if someone says non-blood family can’t be the same or as good or as true or something, because I have both and it is.
People set themselves up as experts in stuff all the time, so I can too if I want.
ineptshieldmaid:
bomberqueen17:
ineptshieldmaid replied to your post:magickedteacup reblogged your post and added: …
Those would be your metasorores! (Borrowing the logic from the poly term metamor, used to describe the lover of one’s lover, or, broadly speaking, the connections beyond one’s love. Horrible greek-latin combo also borrowed from said discourse.)
I love this idea. Metasorores! Welcome to the Metasorority, I say beatifically to the woman who introduced my little sister to her husband, who has my niece as the beneficiary of her retirement plan because she has no blood descendants, to the woman who was told my niece-to-be’s name before I was; you have been assimilated into the [our maiden name] Sisterhood Collective, I will now tag you in everything I post on Facebook about the niece. (Actually she’s mega-rad; she drove from Chicago straight to the farm in one long overnight go, and got out of her car and washed her hands and borrowed a pair of rubber boots and dove straight into delunging turkeys with me, the first time we met [well, we might have met at the wedding but i don’t remember because I’d just driven overnight *to* Illinois and washed my hands and set to work setting tables, so it’s kind of a theme and that wedding’s mostly a blur and I don’t think I drank at all], and we spent six hours replacing the word “love” in every song with the word “lungs” or “blood” because it was funny. Look for our upcoming album on iTunes.)
I have metasorores I don’t know that well, too– the woman who lives near my isolated sister in Georgia and swaps babysitting with her and keeps her alive when none of us can make it down there, or her former college roommate who was sort of nasty to me but that doesn’t particularly matter, we don’t always like the people we are bound to, and she loves my sister and that is important and necessary.
The regular-sorores are kind of on the same page though, I get parenting advice for my non-blood sister all the time as she struggles with her kids, and both my sisters with children have begun writing her letters and exchanging parenting books with her.
Oh I guess there’s another of my underpinning themes, I really like stories about complex non-nuclear non-blood families.
Oh I guess there’s another of my underpinning themes, I really like stories about complex non-nuclear non-blood families.
You and me both, buddy.
*stares at post* I like this post, it is a good post. I’m sure I have seen people talk about blood family and chosen family as intersecting and interacting, before today, but I can’t think of any such examples. I have known many people who feel no one will understand you like family / blood above all / etc; I know many people who are vehemently pro chosen-family, but everyone I know who does actually successfully merge the two usually picks one to talk about as their preferred value system.
I feel like I don’t see a lot of people discuss that kind of blending either? It could be that those who don’t have close blood families sort of avoid it, and those who do don’t see the need?
I think my family is a little unusual because we’re very close but went through a fairly comprehensive period of geographic separation. My father had a close-knit, really big family that scattered to the winds, and never reunited– we see one of his sisters sometimes, but the other two are more remote, including one in Norway, and his brother has an abusive wife who has isolated him, so we haven’t seen him in a decade maybe. But my sisters and I went our separate ways and then tried to come back. One is still far– Georgia’s 1600 miles away– but the others came back from Illinois and Colorado and now live within 15 miles of our parents.
So we had to pursue non-blood closeness if we wanted to live in the style we’d been accustomed to. (One of my non-blood sisters said that she missed me every vacation in high school because I never came around, because I could get what I needed at home, and it’s true, I didn’t really need other playmates. She was the one to track me down after high school, and hold me close; I don’t know that it would have occurred to me to do so. I would be very lonely if she hadn’t, though.)
There is a divide, I think, where people who have mostly known blood-close relationships insist that’s a necessary component, and those who haven’t, or who haven’t had it be non-toxic anyway, insist that it’s not. I do know I sort of expected at least one of my sisters might feel this way, and was a little surprised to find that wasn’t the case! All three of them agreed that they had other relationships just as close as family.
So anyway. If anyone has never had close blood family in a non-toxic way I’m here to tell you that it’s totally bullshit if someone says non-blood family can’t be the same or as good or as true or something, because I have both and it is.
People set themselves up as experts in stuff all the time, so I can too if I want.
