Family Created

This post could have been about taking a young child to the fair and the fun of watching him as we saw cows and horses and ducks and rabbits. It was a fun day with good friends. But this photo says so much more to me when I look at it.

We come from small families, Mr. Kate and I. We each have a sibling who is unattached and with no children. My parents were both immigrants, so I had no family near by growing up. He has a lot of cousins, but is much younger than them and once his grandmother and her generation passed away the family gatherings stopped.

Then we had Bushboy, and realized he too would have a very small family. In fact, even smaller than ours, with no siblings, no immediate cousins and only one aunt and one uncle. (We were fortunate to move to a small city where Mr. Kate’s older cousin lived, and so have managed to make Bushboy a part of that family.)

Of course, we made attempts to create that family outside of the normal family bonds. For whatever reason, we do not have a large circle of people with children around us, either. But we do have some very good friends, and we were fortunate that one of those has been a friend for a very long time, and has therefore known and loved Bushboy since he was a baby.

So now that friend, his Auntie, has a child. And finally we see that Bushboy has created his own family circle, and has experienced that bond of two young hearts connected by a sense of family.

It takes my breath away to see him love this young boy, to know that forever he will have that in his life. And to see him with that young child makes me see the young man he has become.

Family Created, indeed.

 

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