The Blood of the Covenant is Thicker Than the Water of the Womb: On Extended Family and Familial Bonds

Sometimes I feel a little envious of the people who have grown up developing close bonds with extended family members.

My own family were certainly not unkind, and some of them I’ve always liked and had some fondness for. However, I’ve never managed to establish a bond or any sort of closeness or friendship with any of them. We didn’t really do activities together (or it was extremely rare), go for lunches together, that sort of thing. I don’t think was anyone’s fault —  I think it was mostly a result of never really having common interests with any of them… except maybe for one, but sadly I never spent much time interacting with that person. When I was young, my parents wouldn’t visit them often, and I rarely saw them. I have cousins who I rather liked but only saw a couple of times per year at most (sometimes not at all for years) who I certainly wouldn’t have minded being friends with if we could have found anything in common, but that never happened.

I think my failure to establish bonds with family members is due to a combination of factors. Not just lack of effort from them and my parents for us all to connect more, but also my being on the spectrum in a way that just always make it more difficult to understand others and be understood. I don’t mean to blame anyone — this is just how things turned out for a number of reasons and not, I think, due to any moral shortcomings.

As I enter the middle age of my life, it feels like it’s something I missed out on. As a youth I remember hearing others sometimes talk about how they did this or that with this grandparent or this aunt or that uncle or what have you, so I knew that that level of engagement was something that some people did regularly, and I wonder what it’s like to have such a close extended family.

I remember a coworker I had years ago telling me about her family’s annual scavenger hunts. Every year they’d gather for a big reunion in her home city. A few of them take their turn organizing it, and then everyone is sorted into teams of about four with one vehicle per team. Every person on a team had a role. One person was the driver, obviously; shotgun rider was primarily the navigator and driver support, the two in the back would be focused on the clues and searching from the windows. Every team was given their first clue that would lead them to the next, and so on and so on. It  was a race to see who could reach their final prize first. This is probably a pretty rare example of family awesomeness but I remember telling her that I was envious, and I that I wished my family did something like that.

I can say that I bonded with my immediate family. My only sibling is very different from myself, and despite having nothing in common, as children we were able to sometimes play games together, which was nice. My parents definitely felt like close family, but unfortunately it always felt like we didn’t do much together in the way of activities. We would go out for small outings here and there if a parent wanted to shop for something, and they would drag my sibling and I camping with them. I hated it, as it was the most boring camping you could imagine. Unfortunately my parents didn’t have any hobbies or many interests and while they were very loving, caring parents, they didn’t really interact with my sibling and I very much in terms of activities or games or the like. Living in a rural area without public transportation, and with an unfortunately paranoid parent who would not allow me to go off on adventures on my own, I was typically left to entertain myself at home when I wasn’t at school. 

I’ve heard people sometimes describe people that they met later in life as becoming like family. I think that sounds really lovely. I recently read something that said that the expression “blood is thicker than water” is actually short for something like “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”, meaning that bonds formed by choice can be a far stronger connection than those formed by birth. 

In recent years I’ve finally started to become a member of some larger chosen communities. As someone who spent most of her life until this point largely on her own, this is a very new experience for me. I’ve always had a friend or three here or there, and I’ve had a mate at almost any given time for most of my adult life, so it’s not like I was completely alone — but to actually be part of a community or individuals outside of work, school, and romantic partners actually feels really nice. It still feels foreign to me even after a few years of membership, but it also feels wonderful and fascinating.

To think that there are people who have had this for their entire life! I’ve been missing out.