I feel like Christopher and I grew up a whole lot over this week in the strangest of ways.

It’s been a rough couple of months emotionally, trying to recover from what I have since dubbed a “job miscarriage”, where a job opportunity for Christopher fell through. It had been something we had for months been looking forward to transitioning into after he completed his masters program (which incidentally was this month). The hope (though not the possibility) of similar jobs in the same industry has also been severely dimmed. It’s been a bigger letdown than we have let on to many. Our future has been a big question mark. It’s not so much about money. I know we will be taken care of financially – we really have been – but learning to deal with not getting what you feel you earned/feel entitled to, learning to be patient, and trying to figure out where our new place is in the world, and redefining our purpose and function has been an adjustment. We feel like we’ve been fighting to be grown up and have been unsuccessful. We got married. Now we need a career path and to grow our family. Until that happens, we feel somewhat adrift and in a limbo state of being somewhat adults, but not quite as grown up as we’d like to be.

It’s times like these that you really learn to appreciate the most meaningful things in your life that the world cannot provide. Family is at the top of my list at the moment.

My sister Su got married last weekend to a wonderful man and into a wonderful family and thanks to them, we were able to gather the WHOLE family in once place for the first time in 3 years. That was really, really special. We are still getting over the homesick.

It was a really beautiful wedding. My sister and I are almost as different as night and day and we did approach certain things differently, but the overwhelming feeling I felt that day, especially from the deeply spiritual morning tea ceremony and sealing, was that we are ultimately bound together in the long term by something so deep and so true. We have our personality differences, opposing strengths and weaknesses, which bring our own challenges and paths, but I really truly get that they lead to the same place. We’re headed to the same place together. There’s something so potent about that realization for me. I have always loved her and known that my sister is a really wonderful person – much better at doing the right thing the right way than I am – but for some reason just observing her this past week and being there during this highly important transition in her life has unfolded a whole unexplored layer of respect within me for her. Isn’t it really great to have a younger sister to look up to?

Tonight, she and her husband took a good few hours out of their honeymoon trip to spend dinner with Christopher and me in our home here in San Bernardino. There’s something so nice about family visiting the place you call home! And unlike the busy, cluttered time we had pre and post wedding with all the family around, this time we had enough time and quiet to talk, really talk about lots of things, not excluding our family and its issues and our own marriages/relationships. Tonight, I’m really, really grateful for having a sister.

More than this one sibling relationship though, Christopher and I have found ourselves saying things and hoping for things that while may be so natural to most are so uncharacteristic of us. We’re supposed to be the vagabond adventurers that run to far away places seeking new and unique experiences. We’re never content being in one place for too long. We’ve embraced the fact that we will always live far away from family. But why does settling down and having a place to grow roots and call home no longer sound so scary? It actually sounds appealing. Why do we find ourselves wanting to be closer to family all of a sudden? Is it true that we actually positively thought about calling Utah home?! We want to own a house somewhere- seriously?

I feel like we’ve leveled up in our perception of our relationship with family. This week, I got to deepen my appreciation for the role that family plays in our life, not just the immediate families we grew up in, but also the relationship with cousins, uncles and aunts, in-laws and grandparents. From the family time that we got in Utah with both sides of the family, I got a brief glimpse of the eternal role families and family relationships play in the eternities. Because of that, I have a new perspective and want to live more unselfishly. While Christopher and I truly love our families and deeply desire to be in a position to be able to do generous things for them, we have defined ourselves for being fiercely independent and are used to mostly doing our own thing. Something’s changed, though, at least for me.

For example, we’ve always been really eager to have children. For us. I love children. Naturally, I want my own, to learn to be a parent, to see what they are like, to move on to the next phase of life. Now, more than that, I really feel the yearning to have children to share with our family. Su’s marriage and mine have evolved and grown our family. I see how having our children will be the next step in growing, changing and deepening our relationship with each other. There’s more layers to family relationships that we will be able to explore only when we become parents ourselves, our parents become grandparents, our siblings become aunts and uncles, and our children develop relationships as cousins with each other. Family relationships are one of the few where the growth and increase of one member can also mean growth and development for another. And that’s just it. The thing that separates family from everything else is that ability and possibility of growing together as a unit.

I feel like I now really get where our family relationships are headed and how they are going to be a part of our life, and we a part of theirs over the long term. Forever, in fact. I see how we’re meant to grow together and separately. I have a clearer idea of what it takes to keep the family close as each sibling grows up and leaves home. I see that part I need to play as the catalyst and gatherer for family time.

In my observations, I’ve noticed that on each side of extended family, you might find that you have a set of cousins, aunts and uncles that you know better, are closer to, or even like more than any of the others. At first, I thought that it had to do with commonalities, like personality, religion, having children the same age etc. While that helps a lot, often times, the one family you know better happens to be the same one everyone knows better because they actively act as the gatherers, and make spending time with extended family a priority. I think that maybe, just maybe, I could be that person for my family. I know I can. I hope that I will.

There are still so many things I need to work out with my own family. I need to call home more often. I need to learn how to really communicate with my parents. I need to learn to keep up with my siblings and parents’ lives, be involved in their struggles and their triumphs. I need to actively do more for them. I need to learn to really show them how much I love them and how important they are to me. I’ve never been particularly good at being a long-term friend, especially when distance is involved.

For the first time in my life, however, I feel like I have it in me to actually be successful.