The Thickness of Water

My father used to say that blood was thicker than water. It was an Old World view on the importance of family, and about loyalty and commitment, which were somehow genetically based. No one could love you or care about you as much as your relatives, and your primary duty was to take care of them in turn. When it all came down to it, relationships with others were lesser things, superficial and not to be trusted. This was a powerful message, fraught with warning and implications about how we were to navigate in life. Friends might be fun and distracting, which was appealing indeed to someone growing up, as I was, in a house of discord, but they didn’t truly care or count.

And it isn’t as though I did not love my family. Unfortunately, our home environment was tumultuous, and I tried to be a good girl, but I often craved escape. To this very day, my relationships with my surviving siblings are weighted down with painful memories and warped dynamics based on ancient history. If I want to feel lighthearted, this is not where I go, or even if I want to feel seen for who I am. Family: the ones who know you best, the ones who know you least.

But these thoughts are not meant to disparage family, ignore the profound effects of the past we share, or deny the love we have for one another, even if that love is sometimes awkward and a little bit malformed. Blood is indeed thick––five times as viscous as water––and, as one friend pointed out to me, it even coagulates. I will never stop caring about these people tied to me by history and DNA. Despite tragedy, disappointment, and misunderstanding, I know that we were born of love and good intentions, and I honor those attiributes and carry a sense of gratitude for my forebears. The blood has clotted over the wounds, and family remains the enduring and mysterious entity that it is.

It is friendship, however, that sustains me in my present life. My tribe of friends are my chosen family, and lately I appreciate them more than ever. The other day I was explaining the “blood is thicker than water” credo to my friend Carey as we walked together in the backcountry. “Maybe you need to think about the thickness of water,” she said.

And so I am. The water-based thickness of friendship. It is the ice that we can skate on, the deep ocean on which we sail, the quenching refreshment of conversation and encouragement, the force that carves through rock to truth and insight, the meandering into wonder, the propulsion of purpose, the splash and the sparkle and the glint in the light.

It has been hot here, eerily, ominously, miserably hot. The landscape looks tired, the ground beneath the citrus trees is littered with fallen fruit, thirsty deer wander to the road, then disappear like ghosts. After a flurry of Labor Day weekend socializing, my life has the feel of an abandoned stage, but a steady stream of texts connects me to my friends. Sometimes it’s reminiscent of passing notes in high school. How is it that we always have so much to say to each other? It’s an ongoing commentary on life, and it steadies me. Sometimes the texts are funny and newsy, sometimes unabashedly sentimental and even profound: mini-treatises on friendship, on loving hard and giving willingly, on the life rafts we have built for one another. We are tethered by shared values and mutual respect, navigating challenges, bearing witness to wonder.

We did not start out together, but we found one another along the way, and we were fluent in a common language, and our histories merged into the current, and we found our course and tributaries, and these are thick and true, real as rivers.