Chosen family

It's never too late to choose our people.

A True Life Built is a living photo essay on starting over and building a truer life. It’s for anyone, at any age, who is finding the courage to begin again. Subscribe for free posts.

Cooking with Avery in France. June 2022.

Last summer on a family vacation in France, I was making dinner with Avery, my nine-year-old cousin and self-appointed sous-chef. I roasted chicken and caramelized onions while she prepped the salad and set the table in the garden. When dinner was ready, we carried out platters of chicken with fig sauce, pasta and salad. We served the tomatoes on the side because some of us like tomatoes and others don’t.

As we passed the plates, Avery suddenly wailed: “I’m the only one in my family who likes tomatoes!” It had dawned on her that she was different in this small way. Everyone laughed, but I felt her distress. Perhaps she sensed, for the first time, that she might not always fit in with her family. Or perhaps I was projecting because I look at her and see so much of myself at her age.

“Darling,” I wanted to tell her, “I, too, like tomatoes. I too, have big feelings about small things sometimes. It’s ok to be a bit different from your family—more sensitive, more moved by beauty, more prone to tears. They will love you, even if they don’t always understand you. And as you grow up, you will get to choose who you claim for your family, just as I choose you.”

Tomato-gate. June 2022.

I wanted to tell her, in this speech about belonging and tomatoes, that our family was sitting down for dinner in a French garden because we chose to. Before this trip, we were not a family that vacationed together, let alone in Europe. It had been years since we’d gathered at all.

When I was a child, my father’s family had gathered regularly at my grandpa’s house in Arizona. But when he died in 2004, the regular family gatherings did too. There was no ill will, just inaction. Without the eldest generation as an anchor, a center of gravity dissolved and nothing took its place. I saw my cousins sporadically after that and 16 years drifted past.

I accepted this, and all family dynamics, as a given. Back then, I saw family as an immoveable fact of nature, something I existed within instead of something I shaped. But when my marriage blew apart in 2020, nothing felt like a given anymore. My whole world was upended overnight. Suddenly, everything was fragile—and everything was possible. If it could all be broken then it could also be rebuilt.

In this uprooted time, I felt a deep need to reconnect with my family. I was nearly 40 by then, and my aunt and uncle were nearly 80. It dawned on me that they had become the eldest generation and that our time to gather was growing short. Gathering was an active choice, not something that just happened, and if I wanted more family connection then I could create it.

My cousins and aunt and uncle were game to gather—and as long as we were shaking things up, then why not meet in France? We picked a date and booked a trip and just like that we were cooking dinner and passing tomatoes in a glorious garden in the late summer light.

Provence, May 2023.

Last week, I joined my aunt and uncle in France once again, just the three of us. They rented a house in Provence with a pool and an extra bedroom and invited me to join. And why not? In all these years, I’d never spent a week with them. I showed up with a suitcase full of sundresses and no agenda other than to eat my weight in baguettes and enjoy our time together.

We ate plenty of pastries and hunted obscure stone churches in the olive hills. We wound down narrow roads as my aunt and uncle debated directions with the practiced patter of fifty years together. Nancy gave Google directions; Jerry checked them on his paper Michelin map. Nancy pointed out speed bumps; Jerry missed every third one. I listened and laughed and collected these memories like shells.

I won’t remember the churches but I will remember Jerry standing in a beam of light and singing the opening of mass in Latin to test the church acoustics. I won’t remember the towns but I will remember stopping along the roadside with Nancy to photograph fields of fire-red poppies.

My uncle appreciating a church cloister. May 2023.

I will remember eating dinner in the garden once again, and chatting with my aunt and uncle in the late summer light. We discussed my new life I told them all of the things I had wanted to tell Avery the summer before. I told them that I felt a bit different from my family—more sensitive, more moved by beauty, more prone to tears. Yet I also told them that these differences have become my gifts and source of my art. They were delighted to hear it, and to get to know the woman I am becoming.

I’m acutely aware that I waited until the 11^th hour to renew my family ties and create new traditions. If my world hadn’t crumbled I might have missed this family chapter entirely. But it did crumble, and I didn’t miss it, and one could not have happened without the other. Above all, I will remember feeling loved and accepted by family who chose to be with me, and I with them.

Poppies in Provence. May 2023.

One of the unexpected joys of starting over has been hearing from others on similar journeys. If something resonates with you, I’d love for you to leave a comment, drop me an email or share a post with a friend!

Liz is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.