Brey Willows

I wrote the below for an article recently, but the site passed on it, so I thought I’d share it with you here.

What is love?

Love is messy. It’s complicated. It can make you feel like you can take the world by the scruff of its neck and make it bend to your will. It can make you feel like your lungs have been filled with tar, and you don’t know how to clear it without the love you thought you had. You can like people, and not love them. You can love them, but like them about as much as you like Brussel sprouts covered in chocolate.

Tangent.

I was raised by a femme lesbian who came out at 17. It was the 80’s, and the scene in LA was a tight knit community. My mom quickly developed her chosen family within that community. As a little runt from the barrio, I attended women’s rugby games, after parties, huge weekend parties fuelled by alcohol and drugs, and simple weekend get-togethers. I was the lone child among a plethora of lesbians, and that right there is what showed me the importance of chosen family.

When I was learning to drive, a butch woman taught me how to drive a stick shift. Another taught me how to change a tire, (which came in handy many, many times), and yet another taught me how to check/change my oil and take care of the car. When I broke down, one of them came to get me. When an unusual storm made it so I couldn’t drive home, I had chosen family to call, and I stayed at her place. When I began dating, I had a number of my butch parents giving my dates the side-eye. I have no doubt that it kept me safe on more than one occasion.

These weren’t people my age. They weren’t friends from high school. They were community, the people who mattered, the people who understood how we, as queer people, need to lean on each other and be there for each other. I’ve never, ever, been alone in life because of that chosen family my mom was part of.

How f’ing amazing is that?

Now, I’m half a world away from that family. But I understand the necessity of it, and so my wife and I have continued to try to build something like that here in the UK. We’re writers, so we use that platform to bring people together. And we’ve made some amazing friends through that community, who have become our chosen family. People we depend on. People we can call. People who check in on us when we go quiet.

Being queer means we don’t always have bio family to depend on. And even when we do, having people who see us, who understand the challenges, who want to be there, is so incredibly special.

An example: we set up a book stall at Pride each year. We love being part of the community and writing books that have queer characters. A couple came to us and browsed, and we got to talking. One of them had desperately wanted to come over for the previous two years but hadn’t had the confidence. Fast forward a few years, and we now go on holiday with them. One of them writes reviews and is an important part of the queer book community. She found her people. We found chosen family.

Tangent over. Mostly.

That’s what love is. It isn’t always romance. It isn’t flowers, chocolates, sex. It’s being there. It’s being yourself. It’s having someone to call, someone you can count on. It’s knowing you aren’t alone in the world. It doesn’t have to be grand gestures. Sometimes it’s just sending a sigh emoji to someone and knowing they get it.

I don’t like politics. My anxiety notches up about a thousand percent when I start listening/reading what’s happening in that arena. But there’s no question, none, that our rights are coming under fire. The world is polarizing and fracturing, moving backward in many respects. We’re going to find ourselves in need of that chosen family. The children of queer folks, like I was a million years ago, are going to need that chosen family too. If ever there was a time to band together, this is it. Familial love is going to get us through. It’s where we’re going to find our strength and our support. It’s where we can learn from each other, where we can protect one another, and where we’ll find our roots to keep us strong in the coming storms. We may not be related. We may be as different as the leaves in the forest. But chosen family doesn’t have to be alike. It just has to be what we need it to be, and we have to nurture it to keep those connections strong. Our gay daughter doesn’t seem to have the community we did/do, and I worry for her. But then, she has us. She has our friends, who would look out for her. She has her lesbian grandmother, who would take on the world for her if necessary. And that, there, is her chosen family. Hopefully she’ll continue to develop her own as she figures out who she is, and what love means in her world.

Love is messy. It’s complicated. But when you have your chosen family around you, there’s nothing you can’t navigate. Find your people. Reach out. Develop your family the way my mom did, and create that gorgeous web of community that will feed your soul as you move forward.