I grew up in the US. I was a first generation American on my mother’s side and a third generation American on my father’s. What I will tell you here, however, has nothing to do, per say, with that. I want to share with you my roots, my beginnings, and where my sense of family came from.

My mother is Spanish born and raised. She grew up, had her adolescence and early adulthood in the midst of a dictatorship. She was stunningly beautiful, but that wasn’t all she had to offer. She was a woman that was far ahead of her time. She did not marry young; as a matter of fact she was quite old when she married according to the standard of the time. She was an independent thinker, and adventurer; she broke glass ceilings in her very small Spanish town.

My mother was one of four siblings, the second born of three girls and the very aspired to boy. Growing up, this was my clan. Her oldest sister, kind hearted, good-natured and gentle, her younger sister, angry at the world, very inquisitive and at heart a loving, warm woman and the youngest brother, a brilliant man child that was more Peter Pan than man. These are the people that formed the earliest part of my childhood after my parent’s divorce.

My most tender memories involve these people, their love, and their gifts to me. In my world, that was so barren of family, of acceptance because you were a member of the clan, these people loved me. They loved me without condition, with pure abandon and with a genuineness that was palpable. It was in the times I spent with them, the short times, that I learned how important it was to be a family. I took what they gave me and formed a vision of a future family in my mind, could see it in my mind’s eye.

I myself was married at a young age, became a mother before I was twenty, and was perhaps a bit of a disappointment to the woman that had done so much to progress as a woman. I wonder sometimes if in her eyes I set women back rather than moving us forward. As I write this though, I am not inclined to indulge in self-pity. I did things differently, but different does not define better or worse. At a very early age I was clear about what I wanted and what I wanted more than anything was to have a family. I dreamt of having a family of my own, a united, loving family.

My family grew over time. We started with one child, moved on to two, then three, we even tried for a fourth, but that was not to be. I was proud of being a stay at home mom, of having the determination to sacrifice other things to be a single income family, stretching a dollar, just so that I could be home to raise our children. To me, family is and will always be my greatest legacy, the greatest gift I was ever given, and what I fight to maintain.

As we approach the holidays and we all reflect on our crazy, quirky, pain in the butt family members, remember, they are your family. They form part of you, have affected the person you will or have become in life. As for me, there will never be anything greater than family. Even with the pain they may cause, there is nothing better than one’s own clan.