Cheryl  just completed her second day at her new school and apparently  is already the most popular kid in the class. Yesterday she called me after school to ask if she could hang out with her new friends. “Only if you stay at school, don’t go anywhere else and then come right home.”  I told her. Today she brought her new friends over. Very sweet girls. I can’t remember their names. That would be lot to ask of me. Actually I do remember their names, I just don’t recall which one was which.

Cheryl started off by giving them the complete tour of the house. “This is the great room, that’s the laundry room, that’s my stepmother sitting at the computer, here’s the dog…that’s my sister, Eva doing her homework…” One of the girls, it turns out, is a member of a blended family herself and she wanted to know the bloodlines. “Are your siblings half? Whole? Step? What are they?” Cheryl did not skip a beat in her response, “I have two blood brothers and two unblood sisters.”  UNBLOOD SISTERS? It was as if she’d been reading those historical romance novels with those complicated and confusing family tree diagrams at the front of the book. I could just imagine Cheryl elaborating, “These are my sisters  Eva and Sophia. They are  really not my kin. Father married stepmother when I was just a girl and they came to live with us at the manor. We tried to keep it a secret that they weren’t really ours, but somehow it got out.”

I was amused by the parsing of words. Eva, Sophia and Cheryl are sisters, blood or no blood, but when pressed for the distinction, Cheryl described the situation the way she knew they wanted to hear. As the saying goes, ”Blood is thicker than water.”  I am here to tell you, “Not necessarily.” 

It reminds me of a story I read about years ago,  about two teenage boys with similar sounding last names who lived on similar sounding street names, in a small town in Florida. It was discovered when they were 16 that they had been switched at birth. Once the parents and siblings of these boys knew that their son and brother was not their blood, they  made the unanimous decision to keep the child they raised. In this instance, blood was not thicker than water. As I am sure every adoptive parent will tell you.

Half. Whole. Step. Blood. Unblood. Whatever. It’s only a name. A word. It doesn’t really mean anything… Unless of course you are the heroine in a bodice ripping romance novel and discover that the peasant you met and fell in love with in the woods turns out to be  heir in the royal bloodline to the throne and you can ride off into the sunset with him and live happily ever after… Then it means something. But otherwise, these days. Not so much.