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Our stories make us family

My brother-in-law of 30 years tells a story of growing up in a large - very large - family. One of 10 kids, he soon learned that it was important to stake your claim to family resources.

If you didn't, there was likely to be little left for you of anything - including food - by the time your siblings got through.

One of their more delightful family traditions was for Mom to bake pies on Saturday. A dozen pies, to be exact. A pie for every member of the family. You see, one of the lessons she had learned as a parent of such a large brood was that sometimes it was better to do what might seem to other people to be too much, to avoid her children fighting over what seemed to them to be too little.

The pies were meant, to last a whole week. Once the pies were gone, they were gone. And, my brother-in-law remembers, when it got down to the last few pieces of pie, you knew not to look to, your brothers or sisters for any charity. You were on own.

Of course, in any family kids try to find ways to get around the rules. You had to be vigilant about protecting your share of the pies. Some of his brothers and sisters tried to eat as many pieces as possible as quickly as possible in order to get their share.

Some would put away a piece or two for later, but then they had to be on guard against the inevitable attempts at pie poaching. If you were smart, you could find a secret place to hide a piece or two to make them easier to guard.

Which brings us to the best part of the story.

Finally, as a teenager, he figured out a foolproof hiding place. Each Saturday, after retrieving "his" share of the pies from the kitchen (which usually meant an entire pie), he took it - and a fork - and hid them in the bottom of his underwear drawer.

He rightly figured that no matter how desperate his siblings got, they wouldn't think to look under his underwear. Over the course of the week, he'd slip up to his bedroom, close the door, open the drawer, and enjoy his just desserts. The only drawback to this strategy was the tendency of the granulated sugar, usually sprinkled over the pie's top crust, to wind up in his underwear.

In the summer this got a bit uncomfortable, but he thought it was worth the sacrifice.

I've been wanting to use this story in a column for about 10 years, but I could never quite figure out what the moral was. Certainly, it says something about large families, insightful parenting and individual ingenuity. But that wasn't why I remembered it so well, and enjoyed hearing it told more than a few times.

Finally it hit me last Thanksgiving as we were returning from a family get together. Once again I came away grateful for just how well we all get along, and how much I appreciate that I have been blessed with a group of in-laws I really like. And, it seems, the more I get to know them, the more I like them.

And that, I suddenly realized, was the lesson in my brother-in-law's story. For me it wasn't so much the story itself, but what his sharing the story meant to me.

He and I share a lot. We can be quiet at times, love books and movies, and enjoy being fathers. We both have a rather dry sense of humor. And, over the last 20 years, we have spent quite a bit of time together.

What makes us family is this sharing. We know each other's stories. We reminisce about our growing up, our early adult years, and our families. And we tell stories about our lives today - experiencing the death of a parent; struggling with raising our children; dealing with the realities of aging; pondering the satisfactions, frustrations and insecurities of our work.

In all of this, we have built connections that transcend simple blood ties or legal commitments. We have become a family at a deeper level.

Not all of us have the opportunity to be part of families in the way they are traditionally understood. All of us can, however, make family with the people around us by sharing our stories with them and listening as they share theirs with us. And, over time, such intentional intimacy can create family in the truest sense of the word.

• Dr. Ken Potts is on the staff of Samaritan Counseling Center in Naperville and Downers Grove. He is the author of "Mix Don't Blend, A Guide to Dating, Engagement and Remarriage With Children."

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