You Are My Family

Sorry. That may have been misleading. Not YOU, the internet world. Let me esplain. Nope. There is too much. Let me sum up.

My fabulous Uncle "Jay" used to always say:

You can pick your nose
And you can pick your friends
But you can't pick your relatives

I blindly believed this little "nugget" of knowledge for many years but today I will lay waste to Uncle Jay's conclusions.

1. You can not pick your nose, not all the time, not in public, not without a tissue, and MOST especially not in front of your mom, who (if she's me) will tell you how yucky and germy it is. She will then make you wash your hands and sing the entire alphabet song while rubbing the soap in.

2. You can sort of pick your friends. Sometimes you pick friends who don’t care to be friends with you. They publicly mock you in Junior High because you still listen to New Kids on the Block so you go home and burn all of your Jordan Knight posters and destroy your Hangin' Tough cassette, only to continue to be publicly shunned and have your name immortalized on the bathroom wall in permanent marker along with a word your mother told you NEVER to say. (Incidentally, I did find Hangin' Tough in mint condition at a Value Village in Quebec one summer during college so I'm doing better now.)

Sometimes they pick you when you don't want to be picked.

3. Once and only once in your life do you get to pick your relatives.

Yesterday was a day of slovenliness. If Sunday was a day of rest, then Saturday was a day of dead-cheese-laying-on-the-couch-in-a-bathrobe. Seriously. I didn't eat lunch until 3:45 and didn't shower until the evening. I cleaned nothing. We played and chilled all day.

At about 9pm, I got the bug of productivity and started cleaning like mad. We stayed up until 3 in the morning, me cleaning and watching the West Wing Season 1 and Dan stirring up newt's eyes and toad's fingers on his computer to create a new program to help with the administration of the Cirque des Mamans.

At some point around 1 am, I was taking out the recycling when I realized I was looking like a piece of hud and was mumbling some sort of incoherent half-song, half-baby-babble-chant about "Ooo-blah-bagga-bladda-ya-dadda-wa-joojie" aloud to myself, while shuffling tin cans in a house that had been a disaster all day.

DYD sat in his pajamas unfazed. He looked up at me and smiled and continued to work.

I was babbling like an idiot in a strange made-up language, watching left-wing propaganda in his living room and keeping us up until 3 am because I wasted the whole day and he was smiling at me with love, while working on a program I asked him to write for me.

I would never EVER have felt comfortable in this state with ANY boyfriend I ever had. It hit me like a ton of bricks. Do you know who this guy is? He's my family. This should have hit me on our wedding day when we were sealed for time and eternity and everyone told us we were officially a family now, no matter how small. This should have hit me when we had our children. It did, in a way, each of those times.

But for some reason last night, it hit me the hardest. Life is strange. Dan is my family. We are a family. He is my closest relative and I got to pick him. Uncle Jay, you don't know what you're talking about.