- All right.

So I grew up in an interesting family unit.

My mother used to refer to me as the youngest only, which certainly befuddled people.

How can you be the youngest and the only?

Well, my mom has two sons from her first marriage and they are 16 and 17 years older than me.

So we weren't exactly close, neither in age or connection, and they were out of the house by the time I could form memories.

So that youngest only moniker actually made the most sense for my situation.

I grew up a bit of a lonely kid being an only child.

I struggled to form deep, meaningful friendships with kids.

I got along with adults just great.

But kids were a different story.

I was a dancer, I did theater, I did different characters.

I used to steal my grandmother's wigs and wear them around the house and put on her glasses.

My mom said I would take the thing off the back of the toilet and use it as a wrap.

Yeah.

And that was who I was.

And the kids around me, they played sports, they played Barbies.

I didn't play Barbies.

I had invisible friends and characters that I did.

I had enough of those already.

So I faked it enough.

I was social enough, but I always longed for a sibling, somebody that I could inherently understand and that could understand me.

And I guess this kind of caused me throughout my life to struggle to find really truly deeply meaningful relationships.

Like I said, I had friends and I was social enough, but they always felt surface level.

I could never feel that if there was a disruption and harmony of the relationship, that it was going to be safe in the end.

And it was just kind of the through line of my life.

And this was pretty much the story of my life for a long time.

And I can see where I struggled with the friendships too, because I was fun and I was funny and I was silly and I had high energy, but what was I bringing to the table after all of that wore off?

I'm just a blob of skin and cells that's an emotionally stunted mess.

So why would I ever have that deep familial sibling connection with anybody?

Well, all of that changed.

When I turned 37 and I met someone who was my match, he saw me for exactly who I was and who I was not.

And I figured that out in the first five minutes of knowing him, and then I married him.

I did marry him, which was great.

And now I have this person who is my everything.

And I knew right away within the first five minutes that he was going to be something special.

And so did my parents.

The first time they met him, I could see the way they looked at him, the way they talked to him, that this was not just their daughter's boyfriend.

This was a man that was going to be around for a while.

And so much so that one of the very first times that we did something together that he spent time with my family, he and I were going to this fancy event and my mom was like, "Oh, you clean up nice."

And he was like, "Oh, are you saying I looked homeless before?"

And it just created a bond between the two of them, which continued because my mom definitely decided that my husband Mike was her favorite child.

That made me feel great.

And when we did get married, it was very clear that she was his favorite.

But also when we got married, my dad said, "I'm not losing a daughter, but I'm gaining a son."

And his parents felt the same way about me.

They had three boys and they now had a daughter.

An unexpected but welcome piece of all of this is that our parents became friends with each other.

You don't really see that.

It's the stereotypical trope of in-laws over there or I don't like your mom or I don't like your dad or whatever it is.

We all just bonded.

And they live in Arizona.

Even from 2000 miles away, they became friends, like genuinely true friends to the point where one time we were all on a group message and my mom and my mother-in-law just start going back and forth and I just had to find a way to extract myself so that they could just continue on with their conversation for the next three days.

And my dad and his dad would do the very great bonding that men do where they don't talk to each other and sit in a room together.

They would talk about maybe a little bit of things, their time in the service, talk about cars, but they could just sit comfortably and be with each other.

And when my mom got sick, this familial bond and love grew even stronger.

There was never a conversation from Mike saying, "No, that's your mom.

You have to take care of her."

He picked right up and got right into the routine of what we had to figure out in real time as we were crossing the bridge, we were building it.

And his parents from 2000 miles away, they kept in contact.

They came from Arizona in their RV to my mother's birthday because they knew that she was sick and it was important for them to be there.

And in that process, I also gained two brothers.

Mike has a younger brother named Danny, and the first time I saw his pictures, childhood pictures, I knew that I had a new moment in my life where I finally could make fun of somebody else and pick on somebody like they were my sibling and that tease could only come from me.

Yo, this head was so big.

It was the biggest head I've ever seen.

He needed one more person to keep him grounded, which I'm not really sure how he's not on the ground all the time with how big that head is.

And then there's Bill, Mike's older brother, who is not a human at all.

We think he's a cat and we just chase him around trying to grab any morsel of affection that we can from him.

He gives it to us sometimes, sometimes in the form of a handshake or picks an argument just for the sake of arguing, doesn't matter the topic.

Even his stance, he will change stances right in the middle of his own argument just to continue the argument.

And that is a weird way of showing love.

And when my mom got sick and how much his whole family showed up for me, and then in turn when my mom died, I felt very alone, but I wasn't quite as alone as I maybe would have been because I had my mother-in-law and I do call her up sometimes just to have that connection of a mom that my mom's gone now.

And then when his dad got sick, same thing.

We just slid right into it even from 2000 miles away.

I dropped right in and I did everything I could, whether it was shouldering emotional burden or calling hospice agencies and interviewing them when it was time, that's what we did.

It was not a quid pro quo, it was just what's right and what's natural.

And even though I grew up as an only child and I had this trio and two parents that loved me more than anything, I finally, at this point in my life, have a whole unit of people that are my family, even though they're not in my blood, they're in my soul and that's all I could ever ask for.

Thank you.