Blood Is the Start of a Family, Not the Proof of One

Rethinking what we owe the people who raised us

“We are naturally drawn to the people we want to spend time with, and we alienate those who stress us out or hurt us. That instinct is even more primal than blood.”

We’re often told that the strongest relationship is the familial bond. Unlike other relationships, which we forge by choice, family is forged by blood — and as such, the tie is primal, permanent, and unconditional. Think about it. The late nights parents put in, the ever-rising tuition and entertainment costs, all of the time and energy and resources poured into a child without any guarantee of return. And yet we still do it. Parenthood, as we’re told, is the greatest sacrificial act.

That’s why social convention dictates that we reciprocate in kind: that whatever transgressions are committed, we will always find a way to forgive and love each other, because that is just what family does.

We slap this rule around as if it were one of the ten commandments. But what if the parents didn’t hold up their end of the bargain? We do have parents who physically abuse their children — beating them, starving them, working them like servants. Do we expect those children to respect and love their parents regardless? Not only did the parents fail to hold up their end of the bargain, they actively wounded the children, and those wounds, even when they heal, leave scars that follow them for life. Is it really heretical for such a child to say I don’t care about my parents, or even go so far as to say, I wish they had never existed?

You might say those are just a few bad apples. Most parents do work hard to provide for their kids, and even go out of their way just to give them the best. But while the majority of parents don’t physically abuse them, that’s not to say most kids grow up without any scars or traumas. An occasional tantrum here, a snide remark there, a quiet manipulation somewhere else — these can be just as sharp as knives, despite leaving no visible wounds. Do we still expect children whose hearts have been quietly cut up over the years to love and respect their parents the way our culture dictates?

This is the question I’ve been wrestling with all my life.

There’s no doubt that my parents fulfilled their obligations. They provided for me, raised me to adulthood, and funded my education so I’d be ready for society. And there’s no doubt they wanted the best for me — especially my mother. She’d check my homework after work every day, and she’d dedicate the weekend to study with me, all because she wanted to make sure I excelled. But she was also the woman who beat me for getting 95/100 instead of full marks, who boasted to relatives that my four consecutive years at the top of my class proved she was the best “animal trainer”, and who told me, when my father finally divorced her, that she didn’t want me — that I’d be a liability holding him back from forming another family.

I was ten.

I remembered crying myself to sleep at night, planning my escape. That’s why I asked to study in the States, and why, when I returned, I moved out the moment I could afford it. To be honest, I had no desire to see my parents — there wasn’t much to talk about. But social convention dictated that families meet up every now and then, and so I complied.

Over time, I thought we had buried the hatchet. The conversations were civil. All exchanges stayed on the surface, and we didn’t interfere with each other’s lives.

The interaction was … bearable.

Then my baby girl arrived.

They started making demands. They wanted access. They forced their way in even after I said my husband and I needed space. Every time I put up a shield, a voice in my mind would ask if I was being too defensive.

After all, they’re family, right?

But as the question lingered in the back of my mind, memories of their recent transgressions — the fact that they kept calling even after I told them the baby and I needed sleep, or that they guilt-tripped me into the hundred-day feast, then refused to hold it at lunch, even after I explained that dinner would wreck her sleep schedule — all of these started to pour in.

Eventually the thoughts took over. As I was watching my baby sleep, the rumination kept turning in the background. And before I knew it, there were tears sliding down my cheek.

As the first tear fell, it dawned on me: I had never seen them as family. In fact, I had always seen them as an enemy — the greatest adversary in my life, and now the biggest threat to my daughter.

No wonder every engagement felt like an invasion.

I know this deviates from the cultural norm. But the conclusion is unavoidable. Family, like any other relationship, requires genuine love and mutual respect to build a bond. We are naturally drawn to the people we want to spend time with, and we alienate those who stress us out or hurt us. That instinct is even more primal than blood.

So it’s simple — the cultural norm has oversimplified what family actually is.

Blood is just the start of a family, not the proof of one.

It’s too late though. My parents and I have spent thirty-plus years building a relationship on the wrong assumption — that the familial bond is as primal and unconditional as advertised. That relationship can’t be rebuilt now, and their assumptions are unlikely to change.

There’s only one thing left I can do.

Now that I’m a parent myself, I’ll have my own moments of failure — I’m sure of it. But I hope that, by not taking the concept of family for granted, I’ll love and respect my daughter as her own person, rather than as an extension of me, or worse, a trophy or a tool. And I hope she’ll never want to escape this family the way I did — that she sees us as family not because of biology, but because she chooses to.