This is my family. I found it, all on my own. Is little, and broken, but still good. Yeah, still good. — Lilo and Stitch

When Irish Woman and I went to get married, it took almost an hour for both of us to describe the twists and turns of our family backgrounds. Between marriages, divorces, deaths, parents, guardians, and everything else, the pastor was scrubbing his face with his hands as he tried to understand it all. He then pronounced our family as “biblical”. His reasoning was that nobody in the Bible had a nuclear family. Someone always was widowed, or had two wives, or was being raised by an uncle or grandparents. That was a great way of saying what I’ve come to feel: Family is not genetics. I love my blood relatives, but I love the family I’ve gathered over years of travel and heartache just as much.