AUTHOR: M. DATE: 4:40:00 PM ----- BODY:

This is a hard week. I'm going to be just a little melodramatic, okay? My dear friend Meaghan packed up her family and moved to Florida this week. Their move has left me wanting to stomp my feet and whine, "how come we can't all just live TOGETHER for the rest of our lives?" We met a few years back at the civil union ceremony of some mutual friends up in Vermont. The fact that none of us are in touch with those friends now, and that they have since divorced, makes me think that the cosmic reason for the wedding was so that we could meet Meaghan and her partner Chris (because of course the order of the cosmos is all about us). Sometimes people come into your life for all the right reasons, and, though I don't know what those reasons are, I think this was the case this time. It's HARD to make friends when you're not in school and don't have a new baby, or any of those kinds of things that are excuses to meet people with lots in common. So this friendship, even aside from all I got from knowing the two of them and their now-12-month-old butterbean, the divine Ms. C., has felt like such a blessing.

Meaghan, I know you'll read this sometime soon, so hear this:

I miss you terribly, girl.

Femiknit Mafia (my real-life friend) and I have had some conversations recently about the meaning of chosen family. For many people in their 20s and 30s, especially those without kids, and particularly those of us who are queer, chosen family is a big one - we're off and on our own, often far from the families we came from, starting to form our own legal or de-facto families but still stumbling our way through. (I know: no one is exempt from this, but I can only talk about what I know, 'k?) When your friends are everything, it's tempting to think that you'll continue to make decisions as a group forever - if or where to move, who or if to marry, and so on, and that you'll still have your Saturday morning gym date and go to the laundromat together when you're 40 (though I can't say I'd miss that one). It doesn't work like that, though. I get it, I really do - I know I've gone in directions completely different from friends who I thought I'd be attached to at the hip forever. And Meaghan took off for Florida for all the right reasons: to take care of her aging grandparents and be close to her soon-to-be niece or nephew. How can a person fault that? The family you come from, for better or worse, is incredibly important. But it does make me want to weep that we can't just form a community, choose more people to be in our family without any legal connections, and keep building on that for the rest of our lives instead of starting over and over. We've built a culture where leaving your family 1,000 miles behind for college (as I did) is completely normal, where friends don't even expect to be in the same place for more than a handful of years at a time, where there are no formal rituals or even a general understanding of what you can say to a person who has lost a friendship or who has lost the ability to pop down the street and watch a friend's baby starting to walk on her own because that baby is now 1,500 miles away. What's the balance?

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avonlea COMMENT-DATE:9:03 PM COMMENT-BODY:Oh and they have to have the next Bush president as their governor - how tragic.

But now you have a place to stay in Florida - is there a bright side? I guess not, it's sad. I'm sorry. --------