A month ago we took the three-hour trip to my hometown.

My mom rented the same facility where my husband and I handed out gifts to our parents and our bridesmaids and groomsmen the evening before our wedding.

This time she rented it for a goodbye, because cancer is eating away her stepmother.

She walked into the room, and we all tried not to be shocked by all the weight she’d lost. I tried not to cry when I hugged her thin neck. I tried not to turn away when those wrinkles gathered around her smile as she watched my boys chase each other around the room that had held so much happiness 11 years ago. I tried to watch instead. I tried to soak it in. I tried to feel and remember and know.

And then my grandpa cleared his throat and everyone got quiet and he talked about the birth of my mom and her sister and their baby brother and how it was all joy in the midst of pain, because there was a marriage falling apart yet three children to show for the crumbling.

He had married this dying woman, my step-grandmother, 35 years ago.

And even though this story, their story, is full of pain and heartache and loss, I know, too, that it is full of victory.

People had transformed and lives had changed.

Beauty hid in all that shadow.

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When I was just 9 years old, my gifted and talented class was assigned a family tree project—where we’d talk about family culture and values and stories and all those limbs sitting green on a sturdy trunk.

It was one of the hardest projects I’ve ever done, because I tried to connect all those names—Papaw with Memaw, except they’d divorced and he’d remarried Granny, and then there was the other side, Grandma and Pop, only he wasn’t my real grandpa because she’d divorced, too, and married him before I was even born.

And then my parents divorced and my dad remarried, and there were half brothers and a half sister, and then my mom remarried and there was a step-brother, and I didn’t even know what to do with all this.

It was so confusing, and those branches of my family tree were all stunted and tangled and torn, and what was left looked more like a gnarled stump than anything that could possibly grow and bloom.

In a family that could not brag of a perfect tree, what could we really know of love and hope and life?

What could we really know of family?

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What we knew of family were raucous Christmas dinners with aunts and uncles and cousins, when grownups would sit around a table playing Trivial Pursuit while the children begged a turn, too, even though the questions didn’t make a bit of sense to them.

What we knew of family was a grandmother taking in three grandchildren and a grown daughter for a year after a divorce left them poor and broken, a grandmother who had spent her years cooking dinner for her children and now spent another one cooking dinner for three more children who were not exactly grateful, because they hated being here, without their dad, without a space of their own, without the assurance that this arrangement wouldn’t last forever.

What we knew of family was a grandma and grandpa putting aside the bitter of divorce so they could sit in the audience while a graduate delivered her speech, to try to make her forget that one empty seat.

We knew hard, and we knew messy, and we knew awkward, but we also knew devotion.

Family doesn’t always look neat and clean.

Sometimes it looks like a great-grandfather who beat his wife and an older half-brother with prison time on his record and thieves and drunkards and addicts.

There are secrets, and sometimes they are ugly and shameful. But it is in these shadow places that we learn what it means to forgive and accept and love.

This is where we learn to be family.

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He showed up at our door for meet-the-kids-night with two large pepperoni pizzas, and I knew this was the man my mother would marry.

He was younger than her, with a 3-year-old boy, but he looked at me and my sister and my brother like we mattered. Like we were somebody. Like we could put back together two broken worlds.

They married on a sunny day in April. My sister and I wore dresses his aunt made. I sang a love song. My brother held the hand of his son, trying to get him to stand still during the vow-making and the ring exchanging and the kissing.

And then he went to work.

He took us in like we were his own, because that’s what he’d promised my mother he’d do. He sat, bored out of his mind, at my volleyball games and band concerts and all the track meets he could possibly make. He whistled that loud whistle after my brother’s trumpet solo at the football game, because it really was amazing. He drove me to college and stood outside my dorm with my mother, trying not to show his emotions when we all said goodbye.

He knocked down all those walls in the hearts of three children, and he took his place inside, so he was the one who walked them down the aisles on their wedding day. He was the one who didn’t miss a baby’s birth. He was the one their hearts called dad.

And maybe it took a while, and maybe they didn’t make it easy, and maybe it wasn’t the least bit perfect, because what remarriage is, but he stuck around, and that made all the difference in the world.

It was hard and disappointing, that divorce piece, but this piece, the putting-back-together piece, has been wildly beautiful.

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In the room with my Papaw and Granny, who is the only grandmother left, even though she’s a step and won’t be around much longer if the cancer has anything to say about it, sat my beautiful aunt, by the side of a man who is not my uncle.

She bears the scars of a 30-year marriage, of being left for another, of spending three years flailing, trying to make sense of a divorce and what comes after.

She has lived a story like her mother did, like her sister did, and yet…

And yet there is this man who popped the question to ring in a New Year with surprise and joy.

She said yes and pulled those last limbs from the tree.

There is something I have learned in all of this history, and it is this: Family trees are good and lovely and wonderful, and it’s comforting to take shade beneath their limbs when the day gets too hot.

But a family stump offers something, too.

A stump offers a sitting place, a thinking place, a resting place that cannot be disturbed or shaken by high winds or heavy water or the changing seasons.

This is the gift of a broken family.

But the gift-receiving is up to us.

You see, we can choose to be victims of our broken, stump-of-a-family. Or we can choose to let that stump be our victory.

I don’t know who I might have been if my family had stayed intact all those years ago, if I had come from generations of healthy marriages and unbroken people.

But I can say that this stump of a family, who it has made me, who it has made all these people I love most, is enchantingly beautiful.

One day my boys will ask about this tangled family stump. And I will tell them its stories with all the gratefulness a heart can possibly feel.

On that say-goodbye day last month, my stump beckoned me. It said, Sit and stay a while.

Visit.
Love.
Appreciate.

And I did, until it was only my wildlings and their daddy and the ones they call Nonny and Poppy left in the room.