What Would Dumbledore Do?

Family is definitely not constricted to blood ties. I have a blood family that I love but there is a lot of water under the bridge. However, I have a really good friend that I have been friends with now for about four years and I consider her and her family my family and she considers me her family. I get invited over for holidays and birthdays and special occasions. We spend a lot of time together and I don’t know what I would do with out them. They may not be the family of my blood but they are definitely the family of my heart.

I have grown up with so many people that I am not related to, but people think we are because we are so close. I know that no matter what happens I will always have them. I spend as much time with those people as I can and sometimes even more then I do with certain blood related family members.

Family is very important in my life and I through my whole life my mom’s best friend has been like family. That was always a good example for me to see how someone who was not blood could be family. Before Harry Potter, though, I had never accepted anyone into my family that wasn’t always there. My best friend Mary changed that. We are just like family and I love her. She supports me and I her. The fact that our blood is not the same doesn’t change the fact that I love her and she is my sister.

I’ve never had someone who was a family friend become “like family”. Not until a few months ago. My former best friend, Gabe, was family after an hour of talking. In that hour both of us, without noticing, shared our deepest fears, desires, wishes, and wounds of life. Both of us being loners, introverts, and all-together close-mouthed about ourselves, we were shocked when after three hours we knew more about each other and ourselves than anyone we had ever known, including his wife and my identical twin respectively. Thick as thieves, in only a few short hours. And for four months, we were family. His wife was my family too, me having connected with her on a slightly steeper level (he fell for me and she knew it, so decided to keep me close) and he and I were almost never unaware of the other. I know, to my great regret, that when he did shove me out of his life, that it was this familiar connection. His whole family, people I’d never met, nor ever will, sent me messages on myspace adopting me as family because of how happy he’d been lately, something they attributed to me. But they warned me he didn’t let anyone get close, and I have a feeling that when he was talking to his mom on the phone, me beside him, and she adopted me as her surrogate daughter on speaker, perhaps it was the final nail in the coffin. Might’ve been that he told me he’d fallen in love with me and I told him he wasn’t allowed to, he was married, whether he wanted to be or not. And still, after a month of alienation from each other, I feel the connection to my brother, my Onii Chan. And to hear his wife tell it, when he isn’t angry at me, he admits he misses my “eclectic personality”. Something, strangely enough, I only ever had around him. He will always be my brother, and she will always be my sister, and though he and I will likely never speak again, I know I will always be his Imouto, in one way or another.

yeaa like me and my besties. we are 180 degrees different ethnically and the religion. it doesn’t close or end up our relationship. i grow up with them and understanding each other. we think we are sisters

The reason why I first felt so related to young Harry was because we own had our “Dursleys”. I know what it feels likes to have your own Weasley family there right behind you. The same with Sirius when he ran away from his own “family”, he went to the Potters’ who loved him.

‘Family’, like ‘love’ and ‘home’, is a tragically badly-defined word. Some people use it only to refer to those whose blood they share–and of those, there are some whose family doesn’t include, say, cousins or second-cousins. Other people use it liberally, referring to a sports team or a group of friends, or perhaps just one friend. Of those, there are some people that don’t even refer to their blood-relations as family! Yes, emotions and emotional deals suffer the worst of communication issues, because the heart is the domain of emotions, meanwhile words reside in the brain. We can usually find the right words, so long as what we’re talking about doesn’t wander too far toward the heart.

I think the blood-relation family resides far more in the brain than love-family, thus we should have no trouble thinking up names for it. Family should therefore be the name for a close one, thus rendering this lesson somewhat moot, but perhaps it oughtn’t have to be a lesson.

You know, my father had a vasectomy before he married my mother, and my mother, who had never had children, wanted one. So they got a sperm donor and here I am. Should I not consider my two half-sisters and half-brother family, nor my multitude of nieces and nephews older than me family? Should I not consider my own father my family, because of a bunch of silly chromosomes? I’d like to think that loving someone close goes beyond strands of DNA.

I’ve learned first-hand that blood ties are not as important as emotional ones; I was adopted and have never known my birth parents, nor my older brother and sister. This doesn’t bother me, however, because I have a loving father and a little sister (also adopted) who are more of a family to me than my “real” family ever could be, even if I met them. It’s all about the time you spend together and the emotional connections you form.