Enough with the "blood is thicker than water" thing.

People are people are people

I don’t need you to be “my blood” for me to love you. I don’t need our ancestors lives to have intertwined for me to care about you. I don’t need the shared stories of how we grew up in the same address, eating the same foods to have compassion for you. I won’t show up for you only because we’re related. Just because we’re genetically synced I won’t find a home in you, in a way that I won’t in others. I don’t need to birth my own child to feel so much love for another soul that my cells beam. I’m not attached to this idea of keeping one particular bloodline flowing, when all of us here hold blood in our vessels.

I care about hearts and minds and the joy that someone’s presence gifts to me. I love the lives that are so curled up in mine from people who I met on screens and in streets. I love the people in my family not because we originate from the same sources, but because they are fundamentally good humans.

Yes, I can spend hours with hands tucked under my chin in awe, thinking about how beautiful it is that I once lived inside my mother. Yet, the love I have for her lies not in the fact that half of my DNA is the same as hers, but in the mesmerising beauty of her character. Even if she didn’t birth me, I would still want to roam each acre of soil on this planet looking for her in every lifetime. Between each breath a deep gratitude for why we chose each other, is to be found. Irrespective of genetic material.

Sharing banana pudding in NYC with my Mama

What does it even mean to be blood? I made the decision to not have my dad in my life anymore. This was around 13 years ago, and I haven’t spoken to him since. I refused to begrudgingly sit through quarterly phone calls with him where I had to drink down my rage. The thought never once occurred to me that I should entertain someone who treated me with such agonising indifference; simply because he’s my dad.

For me, a parent is a title that’s not given upon birth or the name scribbled onto a birth certificate. It’s earned through actions that marry words, and a loving-kindness that lifts us up over the sheltered hedge of the family home and into the vastitude of the world. If that’s not there, then why should I remain there? Why am I expected to pour love into an empty vase with its shards of glass cutting into me that I still bear the scars of?

I’m allergic to any expectations that are threaded into social structures that allow mass comfort and individual pain. It’s comfortable to the masses to say we want someone who is family-oriented on a dating profile. It’s comfortable for families to all get along. Mum and dad to stay together. Siblings sending memes in WhatsApp groups. Sending mothers and father’s day cards to keep the card shops in business. Inviting relatives you only met once at a funeral ten years ago to your £125 a head wedding to sit next to the beloved friend whose lap you’ve wept in and legs you’ve walked through life in solidarity with.

It’s a threat to the existence of the nuclear family when children deny their parents access to them. It’s a threat to systems that lack and deprioritise a care economy, in favour of “don’t worry your kids will look after you when you're old, because the state won’t”. It’s a threat to the narrative that blood is thicker than water, if you have to look beyond your household to find in the platonic fields, the people who will hold your hand through life. It’s a threat to any extractive and exploitative systems, that seek to disconnect and isolate us, if we see in each other the kind of beauty that we were told was reserved for the people we share a name with.

I’m not about it. I’m not here just for blood, I’m here for water. We are all made of water. Roughly 60% of our bodies are made up of water, while around 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered in water. Water is what connects us, from one living being to another, and back around to our planetary mother. We’re made of water. Came from a womb-like sea of amniotic fluid.

Love notes from my partner whenever he is by the sea

I’m here for water. The water in you and me, that isn’t defined by what DNA we share or if your uncle is related to mine. Think about how many people we walk past each day. We share trains, sitting next to so many folk whose names we don’t know. We ask people in shops how they are. We get into taxis with drivers we don’t know. Eat food cooked by hands whose faces we might never see. Doctors save our lives, we don’t invite them over for dinner, lives never to meet again. Delivery drivers who come to our doorstep more than most of our cousins ever will. Service workers who sort out our recycling and intimately touch our waste; we never know them. The people who compliment you in the street and then just keep on walking. The ones who go out of their way in hectic days to help you. Then, all that you do for people. Over and over again, the bicycle wheels of receiving and giving keep spinning.

Isn’t it beautiful, the things we do for each other to make our stay here a bit more pleasant? Isn’t that just as beautiful as being blood? Maybe even more so. These acts of non-obligation and non-requirement, these simple acts of quiet love for the people we incorrectly label as strangers but are actually the aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, mothers and fathers that we share this blue planet with.

We are all made of water.

Stomping through life holding hands with my best friend

This week, I was struck by the words that greeted me from two TV shows. One, was Married At First Sight Australia, where one of the grooms told his new wife who had a son, that he was concerned he wouldn’t be able to love her kid as much as he would love one of his own. Then, onto the documentary An Update on Our Family, detailing the family vlogging couple who had their own children, then adopted a three-year-old boy with autism from China. They vlogged every single detail of the adoption process, his doctor’s appointments, and daily life on YouTube. Before deleting all the videos of him from said channel and telling viewers, that he was “re-homed” to another “forever family” because they weren’t prepared for his trauma and extra support he would need.

Blood is thicker than water.

One of the reasons why I don’t want children, is that I love children, I just don’t feel the need to have one of my own at the detriment of the desires, slowness and spaciousness I want in my life. I don’t want my time to be swallowed up in caring for one or two kids of my own, when there are 2 billion children here. The time I get back can be spread amongst reading to a child in hospital for a few hours, helping a single parent, doing watercolours and practicing letters in community centres. I’ve spoken about this before here, but I don’t need to own things to love them.

We all hear endlessly from parents that you just don’t get it unless you have your own child. Sure, there will be feelings I won’t ever understand, because of that. Just in the same way that I will never understand a ton of other experiences I’ve not lived in, but I know what love is. I know what empathy is. I am human. I know what it means to love a human.

I understand that there is a unique and precious bond and desire for protection that comes from carrying a child within you for nine months or contributing 50% of its existence to. But, when we are stuck on this blood is thicker than water thing, it has an impact. It has an impact on children who are adopted with platitudes of “we’ll love them as if they were our own”, when they are innately loveable with or without you. It has an impact if even at times of diminished capacity you would never even think of “re-homing” your own child, because they’re blood right, but would the thought occur if they weren’t yours.

The impact extends into the anthropocentric approaches of humans at the top and owning or disregarding everything we deem to be beneath. The difference between the care that’s extended to pets who are called family, and the lack of care for local foxes who are labelled as pests, snails squished underfoot and pigeons shooed. The plants and flowers grown in someone’s own garden that are caressed, loved and tended to multiple times a day compared to the litter-soaked parks with treaded on blooms. The way we protect the homes we own with home insurance, flood protection, anti-theft measures. Painting walls and renovating. Yet without this earth that we don’t always think to protect in the same way, there would be no homes. Earth is home.

The world’s gardens, not just our own

It reminds me of misogynists who mistreat women who aren’t their mother, sister, or daughter. Blood is thicker than water. The women with daughters who are quick to banish reproductive rights for other women’s daughters to ensure theirs and their family’s proximity to power. Blood is thicker than water. The political leaders who pay for enhanced security, and the very best healthcare for their family, but strip it away from the masses. Blood is thicker than water.

Blood is thick. We feel its rich stickiness when we receive hugs from the people who raised us. Stood by us. Celebrated us. Taught us. We feel how unctuous it is when our parents and grandparents are ill. We feel it. Yet what we’re feeling is none other than the roots of love, that are not only born from blood, but the water that lives inside blood. We say blood is thicker than water, but we forget that around 55% of blood is made of plasma, of which 90% is water.

Water.

Water.

We are all made of water.

Your neighbours, friends, people you pass in the street, our lovers, partners. The other 8 billion people who we may never meet but so desperately need.

We are all made of water, and that water is just as thick.