To the family that gave me a bed when I needed one,
I like to call myself a writer, but the words to describe how thankful I am for what you gave me is beyond my capability. Not only did you give me a bed to stay in, food to eat and a roof over my head but, you gave me another family to love.
It started out cold and lonely being on my own, unattended by parents. I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning. Perhaps I could have avoided them if I had someone there who had experienced them already. The growing pains of my childhood returned in the form of adulthood and independence. Not having anyone to answer to was a blessing and burden. On some days after a game, I remember feeling empty. I had to drag myself to the parking lot, holding back the rage that infuriated me. Why? Why was it that where all my friend's parents stood in the stands there was an empty space where my family should have been? It wasn’t that my family didn’t love me or couldn’t give me the time of day. Through divorce and compromise after compromise, my little family got spread pretty far away from one another. My mother was working as a night nurse in Syracuse, NY while my father followed his job as a sales manager for Miller Electrics out to Appleton, Wisconsin and my sister Ellen was caring for her newborn daughter in Sparta, NJ. The love I bear for my family by blood will always be unconditional and everlasting. Despite this fact, I still felt that void in my life.
Come my senior year of high school, my best friend of 7 years, Aaron, and his family offered to allow me to live in their home in order for me to finish my senior year in my hometown. In addition, I divided my time between their house and my sister’s in order to distribute out the cost of feeding me. This was the first time in my life that I was not beholden to either of my parents. There was no one in my life who had absolute power of my decisions.
Since Aaron and I shared the same school and football schedule, I invested a majority of time at his house. Since the beginning, Aaron’s family welcomed me and brought me into their family as one of their own. I quickly became referred to as "son number three." Almost every night, we sat down and enjoyed a home cooked meal with the entire family. Prayers were said and the food was consumed while discussing every subject from local school drama to disorganized political debates. Regardless of what we talked about, it was a family dynamic that brought everyone together at the end of every night.
Every family has the littlest details that only other family members pick up on. For example, my pseudo father, Papa Keck as I called him, constantly insisted on taking photographs of me and Aaron at every opportunity. Normally this was not an issue except for some reason these “Kodak moments” always came when Aaron and I were in a hurry to get where we going. Ruth, my second mom, insisted on washing and folding my laundry even though I had been doing my own laundry for several years. Not to say I wasn’t grateful, but it was strange to have someone else take on that responsibility in my life. On an average day, I'd walk down to the basement where the PS3 and TV were set up to find fruit snack wrappers and Mountain Dew cans scattered across the room. This was my second brothers Cameron's doing. Then there were the dogs. Although I had been living in this house for close to a year, Samson and Cassie would go into a furious rage of howls and barking. This continues even to this day. To finally have some things in my life that were consistent and a regular occurrence brought me solace.
Interestingly enough, no one in this family is blood-related, which made me the third adopted son in this family.
To this day, whenever I come home from college, it is expected for me to make an appearance with my second family, lest I receive a disgruntled text from one of my other parents. My family isn’t perfect but in my opinion, the perfect family is hardly worth having. No matter what may faze me in my life, I know I will always have a bed and room to rest my head should I need to. So from the bottom of my heart—Ruth, Don, Cameron, and Aaron, thank you for giving me another family to love.
