boy meets family

the classic event of taking a boy home to meet the family is so cliche it's not even interesting.
or so i thought.
you make introductions, you field questions (so, what exactly are your intentions toward my daughter?), you get drunk...

wait a minute! drunk?

there were a couple factors that surprised me about an event i'd thought was pretty standard.
i did not in any way expect my sister-in-law to ply nick with alcohol while shooting the hardball questions at him!
okay, so they weren't drunk, per se, but they were definitely loose. nick said it was a lot easier to open up and be himself (i'm sure!). dan didn't get back from work (fighting fires, saving lives) until the next morning, but by the time cari was done with nick, he wasn't even nervous about meeting dan!
in all honesty, cari asked great questions, and led the conversation in a way that brought out some ideas i hadn't thought through before. things like core passions nick and i share, if we mesh well with each other's goals in life, what role we might play in our ideas of the future. she was direct and to the point, and sometimes that's just the best way.

another thing i didn't expect was my own emotional response during the visit. i'm a very intuitive person to begin with, very much a feeler, not so much a logical rationalist, i've known this. so as the week progressed, i found myself feeling very distant from nick for no particular reason that i could identify. then as the rest of the week went by, people got more friendly, more loose, more themselves, and i found myself being drawn to nick again. after thinking it through later, i realized i'd been putting more stock in what my family thought of nick than i'd expected to. turns out, their approval is pretty important to me after all. at first, watching them be so polite and considerate was nice, but i was waiting to see if nick was going to fit in, in a real way.
it makes me wonder how some girls can marry guys against their parents' wishes -- this coming from me, the girl who sees her family maybe once a year?

it was reassuring to me. our roots are hard to see. they're theoretical, intangible. half the time you don't know how important it is to belong to a family.

maybe those roots are hard to see because they run so deep.
they're a part of everything about me, whether i like it or not, whether i admit it or not, whether i realize it or not.

whether i realize that's a really good thing.
or not.

i've discovered that in spite of my own shortcomings, they are a true family to me. i can be too independent at times, i don't keep in touch like i should. regardless, i can count on them to be what keeps me grounded.