Family friends

I once read somewhere that friends are the family you have chosen. It's always easy to think of our friends as family, but it's more unusual to think of our family as friends.



My sister and brother are two of my best friends in the whole world. I love them fiercely, and though we have our fair share of sibling spats, we get along famously. We can attribute our closeness to having spent so much time together growing up (and even now that we're all twentysomethings) and sharing many interests and obsessions (we're all LOTR fanatics, Jedi wannabes, and *gasp* Trekkers :p). We have a pact that we will never let anything tear the three of us apart, be it huge famiy disputes or trivial disagreements.

Only lately, however, have I started feeling that I am now becoming friends with my parents as well. I don't know if it's because I am now working with them (but heck, it's only been a week), or my age (close to a quarter-century now, eek), but I am more at ease with them and find myself agreeing with them on a lot of the same issues. In fact, I suspect that my brother is getting annoyed with me for acting like a third parent more and more, especially when it comes to his upbringing.

I don't want to alienate myself from my siblings just because I am becoming chummier with my folks, but I believe our tight bond will survive this transition, although it will take time for my siblings to adjust and maybe catch up to me in terms of maturing and seeing things from our parents' point of view. Our biological ages are not very far apart (2 and a half years between me and Hanks, 1 and a half between her and Bens), but our school ages may be the factor here (4 whole years between me and Hanks, 2 years between her and Bens). I can only hope that when the time comes, we can all understand each other even better and all 5 of us can be family and friends.