Blood can never be turned into water

Family equals identity

My mother always said "Blood can never be turned into water", which translates into the idea that family comes first no matter what happens. I used to hate this idea, I always wished I would have been born into another family or simply put, to never be born at all. As time passed, I have come to understand the meaning of that sentence more and more. Now I think that, yes, blood can never be turned into water, but when mature enough, people can decide if they either want to embrace it or reject it. As big as my family is, they've all been separated so much throughout generations, that it became a tradition. Hate, jealousy and the strive for money and power became their legacy. That, from both my father's family and my mother's, could be seen from a distance. It put a stamp on us, on me, that felt and feels like a tattoo. I was always known as the poor but smart and shy girl by the people that knew my family, for the rest of the world, I always had different words attached to my image.

Nonetheless, my family had a terrible illness: Terror  of What Others Might Think. An illness that was meant to put restraints on what I do, think and say but never actually affected the rest of my family. Growing up in this family has thought me a lot. I did not always understand and i've always blamed destiny for everything, partly because I grew up with a mother that never accepted her own mistakes and partly because I got used to the idea that I could never change who I am because I was the result of decisions taken by higher forces. Let me get to the beginning of this, but hang on, it will be a long story. Like any other family, mine was separated into two main branches: one from my mother and one from my father.

My mother's family came from a major branch of people that were initially born and raised in the countryside but with generations ended up in the capital of the country. My father's family. on the other hand, mostly from what he told me, came from Greece. I don't know why they came and why they decided to stop here, frankly, they were long dead before I was born. Both families had their own amazing stories in my opinion, The D.-C. family(my mother's family) had and still has many major ideas, morals, contradictions, etc. that I do not stand for and I never will. Morality, as I came to understand it, did not actually matter or made sense. My grandfather was a raging womenizer and an alcoholic who did not actually know how to love his family but admitted his mistakes in his last moments.That's how much I know about him since he died when I was a baby. My grandmother on the other hand, was not perfect, but close to. She was an orphan and grew up with other 4 brothers and a sister in a small rural part of this country, raised by her grandmother. She was hard working, smart and kind. This two grandparents had two kids, two daughters, my mother being the young one. These girls grew up to have one kid each, but we'll get to that later.

The reason I say I do not stand for their "way" of living is due to growing up emotionally incapacitated. The only one with whom I made a true connection with and who touched my soul, was my grandmother. My mother, i'm gonna call her Steph, was a young mother, she had me when she was only 19 years old, so she just struggled and struggled to make money to raise me, as well as trying over and over again to find a man. With this said, Steph never came to actually embrace motherhood and never made a sincere and pure connection with me. From this it resulted into me forming myself on my own, using my family only as examples of what I want or don't want to do. I could never relate to them, I could never feel as part of the family and this is something that I could never tell them as I grew up.

The other important part of my identity were the I. family, I can't say I know much about them, most of them where dead before I was born and others died when I was too little to fully comprehend their loss. Exactly as it happened in the other family, the D.-C.s, there was only one person who established a connection to me, that being my father's uncle, who I considered and I will always consider my grandfather. From what I heard, he was a lonely alcoholic, but he was not dangerous when he drank and he was never treating me or my mother disrespectfully. I only remember him as kind and funny. My father, on the other hand, was distant, reluctant and he mostly acted as he couldn't care less about anything. Alcohol and women were his most preferred activities. Even before I was born and to this day, I know this man, Alex, never knew and was never ready for a child, most importantly, for a daughter.

That being said, now I can start to lay down everything that I experienced being born into this family and raised the way I was.