My kids love their Uncle James.
“Jimmy” to most of the world, their Uncle James is neither my brother nor my husband’s. Nor is he married to anyone’s sister. But, we’ve chosen him as part of our family and we’re grateful that he’s chosen us too.
A friend with whom my husband had an instant rapport when they met 16 years ago, we couldn’t do without him. When my husband and Jimmy met, I was out of the country, working for the summer in southeast Asia. The two of them were cast in the same shows at a regional theater, lived across the courtyard from one another, and – via what now seems like a laughably ancient system of emails downloaded at one terminal, printed on a dot-matrix printer – I learned that David had developed a new friendship. (My somewhat anti-social husband finding a friend? All on his own? I was impressed.) But, as the summer progressed, I feared from afar that on my return home from abroad, I’d be faced with an eye-rolling, sarcastic stranger who would greet me with: “Oh great, here’s the wife to spoil all the fun!”
Instead, happily, their new friendship expanded to include me. Back then, as now, there’s something in Jimmy that makes me feel safe as though I’m with a trusted brother, gifts me with a bracing “splash-of-cold-water-in-the-face” perspective when I most need it, challenges me to be a better person, and makes me feel grateful to be myself and in the world.
The autumn after we all met, my husband and I learned that I was pregnant with our first child. As the months went on, Jimmy was a wonderful support to me, oohing and awing at the book that showed the baby’s development at this many weeks or months, pretending not to notice when I gulped down obscenely large Oreo shakes, and nodding sympathetically as I described my new-found heartburn.
Fast-forward to the present and you’ll find Uncle James proudly displaying pictures of his nieces and nephews — his biological sister’s sons as well as my sons and daughters — in his home. He’s a friend who’s always known when to say “Please stop!” to the kids when they jump all over him or sing him the same two lines of a song over and over and over. He’s honest with them, “No, I really don’t like Glee,” and supportive, “Oh, it’ll be better soon. You gotta just get through this time.” They trust him, long for his visits, and know he is there for them via email, Facebook, or the phone when he’s not in town.
In other words, he’s become family. A few years ago, we finally named it and pronounced to each other that, despite a lack of common blood relatives, we were forever members of each others’ families. Later, I posted a picture on Facebook of Jimmy and one of my sons and wrote the caption: “Ian and his Uncle James.” A friend who knows my son Ian well assumed we meant he was a blood relative and wrote, “Wow! Look at that family resemblance.”
We all loved that because despite the lack of close common ancestors, the mixture of races in the family (our Latina daughter by adoption, our northern European kids by birth, Jimmy’s half Lebanese bloodline, my Scots blood, my husband’s German roots), we have come to resemble each other.
Birth, adoption, marriage, friendship – chosen family. Isn’t it the best kind?
Journalist Jennifer Grant is the mother of four and the author of Love You More: The Divine Surprise of Adopting My Daughter.
