Thinking of family makes me sad. Not for reasons you might imagine: absent or abusive father, distant or alcoholic mother, bullying siblings. I grew up happy and healthy, a middle child in a mid-western, middle-class, middle American suburb. Our extended family (eight cousins from three families) combined for all the major holidays as well as summer picnics. My older brother married first and had his family, so for a time we moved the gatherings to Boston. Finally, I married into a large and loving Italian-American family; my husband was the eldest of three boys and fourteen cousins, many of them still living in his hometown of Ithaca. Presto: instant super-size crowd available for gatherings centering on food, fun and family.

Then it all disappeared. My family ties came unraveled in what felt like an instant, although it probably happened over a period of five years. A death, a disagreement, a distancing, more death:  the entire structure, loose of its moorings, slid off the face of the earth and into the bottomless ocean. One day my identity was anchored firmly in place—a daughter, a sister, a sister-in-law, a wife, a family member; the next day, I was none of those things.

To the year 2010, then: I am a widow with no children. My parents both died not long after my husband. I remain a sibling; in fact, my still-single sister and I are very close, which is to say we get along famously, except when we don’t.  My older brother is another matter:  Famously self-involved, he also harbors deep resentments that put him in imaginary opposition to his sisters. His sons, my grown nephews would be mysteries to me were it not for occasional Facebook sightings. My cousins are scattered around the country with varied interests and variously successful relationships with their own children. I try to stay in touch with my husband’s family but I am, after all, the widow of the beloved eldest son, now dead--and there are no heirs.

Some of this is “normal” –time and distance break up families and death and disagreement certainly do. Besides, my friends tell me, I’m free to spend Thanksgiving at the movies and Christmas in the Bahamas if I want to. Not for me horrific reunions or obligatory weddings or funerals; I’m not responsible for frustrated matriarchs, infirm uncles or tippling aunts, sulky text-crazy teenagers or bratty little kids. No dysfunctional family ties; no family ties at all.

On the other hand, ties aren’t so bad. On certain days, I feel the lack as a psychic mark, painful as any nasty rope burn. I miss being married and I miss being part of a family. Not that I need the heartache, mind you; it’s just that as  anyone who is not part of a nuclear family will tell you, the myth dies hard.

There’s nothing to be done but to create a family out of whole cloth and that’s what I’ve been doing. It hasn't been easy but the times help; we now use the term “family” to include a whole slew of people who aren’t connected by blood or marriage. The Internet helps too; my “Cavachon” family is made up of six women with whom I had absolutely nothing in common except the kinds of dogs we owned when we met on a chat board in 2005. Now we take our most intimate and vexing problems to each other and serve as the kind of “girlfriend” group I never had before.  When I refer to my “kids”, I might be talking about Alyson, a young woman I hired fifteen years ago, and her husband Eric, whose adopted children know me as “Nona Nikki.”  Another Eric has been like an older brother to me for thirty-five years; I still call him for advice and I think of his wife as my sister-in-law.  I am called “aunt” by the young children of my late husband’s brother and “aunt” by the grown children of another “brother,” a former exchange student from Uruguay. I have spent the last eight Thanksgivings at my friend Patty’s; a widow like me, she has a new fiancé, a new family she’s folding into her own and always a spot at the table for me, it would seem. I’ve attended the funerals of my friends’ parents and the weddings of their children.  My sister and my dog make up my small but potent nuclear family.  

For the first time, I also find that belonging to a community of people who call themselves writers has made me feel a sense of kinship as strong as any family ties. That's made all the difference in the world to me.

And I can still spend Christmas in the Bahamas.