Friends are the family you create for yourself.

You were born of two parents, and maybe you have brothers and sisters, or maybe you don't. Even if you were an only child, you are still part of a family that came into being without your input. You are the product of sex and bonding and absolute happenstance. Your parents may have wanted you, but they had no idea who they were getting.

With luck, you love your parents and they love you. Maybe you even love and value your brothers and sisters -- and/or your step-brothers/sisters, if your parents divorced and re-married. Maybe you're thankful that you've been granted such a wonderful and supportive family.

However, if you're like most of us, you consider your family a mixed bag. Yes, there are some you would have chosen for yourself, but there are others that you wish had been born into a different family, who would have to deal with them out of your seeing. You admire certain traits of your parents but find others a little short-sighted. If you had your choice of a family, you would include some members of the one you were born into but not others. There are people you've met -- or will meet -- who you wish had been your sister or brother or even a parent.

All of us experience this, and most of us feel guilty about it. If your original family was horribly abusive, then, of course, you should reject them and find friends and mentors who will fill the void. But most of us have families who probably didn't understand us but who didn't mistreat us. But now we're out in the world, encountering people from similar or very different families who are giving us their own -- often surprising -- points of view on growing up. Sometimes it opens our eyes; other times it confirms what we'd thought all along but didn't know that other people thought it, too. Whatever we hear, and however we take it, we become more determined to establish our own identities, absent family influence.

In the end, though, we do have to deal with family. There is some inherent bond built into us that we can't break. If your mother gets sick, or if your father falls off a ladder, or if one of your nieces or nephews graduates from high school, etc., you have to do something: visit, call, send a card, whatever. There is no escape from family, and there shouldn't be. They are who we come from and who we are most like, for better or worse.

But friends are the family you create for yourself.

These are the people who know you best, who met you when you were older and have a better sense of who you are. The you they know is the real you. (The you your family knows may well be way out of date.) If you're really lucky, some of the members of your family are among this select group, and you should count your blessings and don't complain about another thing the rest of your life, okay?