The A to Z challenge this month asks me to consider the blogging family. Once, I followed more than a dozen bloggers, fellow scrapbookers, mainly, but somewhere along the way, I stopped. Blogging seemed to go out of fashion, and those scrapbookers either stopped blogging, or they changed their focus. Or maybe they simply changed media. Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and other forms of social media have taken over. Somehow, I never caught on the Instagram or Twitter. Pinterest sometimes interests me, especially if I am looking for ideas to create something. Blogging, though, has continued to be a way for me to record some of my thoughts–the ones I want to make sort of public, anyway (the rest are “hidden” in my pen-and-paper journals).

Family is a tough word. Who is my family? Is it confined to those who are related by blood? Or is there a broader version of family? Well, it’s both when you stop and think about it. In my little community, it seems we are all family in some way or another–cousins x-times removed, sisters, brothers, in-laws, aunts, uncles–you get the picture. There is also the church family since most of my neighbors and I attend the same church. There is also my book club family, those women I meet with once a month to share our love of books and reading.

There are my sisters, women who are such close friends that we could be blood sisters.

There are so many variations of family. One of the tropes of contemporary literature is that of the “found family,” people who share experiences that lead to strong bonds of kinship. We need those found families just as much as we need our relations and kin. Some researchers suggest that humans are perhaps more isolated than ever because of technology and social media. We can hide behind our screens. Certainly, we communicate with others, but relationships become more superficial. (I won’t even go into the ways social media and on-line communication allow us create new identities.) So, it is even more important that we cultivate in-person relationships with our kin as well as with our found families.