I'm Adely Mone and this is The Slowdown.

I've spent a long time thinking about what the word family means.

I was asked by a stranger once if I had a family.

I was at a writer's conference and she wanted to know if I had a family to go back to.

At the time this was deep into my own issues with infertility and I kept thinking of my

husband and my dog and of course the answer was yes I do have a family and I have parents

and two brothers, a lineage, birds and trees and why must we limit the word family to only

ever mean one thing.

For as much as I love words, words can be exhausting.

It seems everyone around me is always talking about the power of words and yet we are often

careless with our language.

Family is a word that is expansive, undefinable, full of connections that go beyond time, beyond

the grave, beyond the future of possibilities, it is about what we choose and our bloodlines.

All those things move through us when we think of that word.

To be human is to be part of a lineage whether we like it or not.

I remember the look on my face when the woman asked me if I had a family.

She clearly meant children.

She didn't know that I couldn't have them, that I would go on to be happily child-free.

But she also didn't know that her question gave me the gift of doubling down on what

it means to be interconnected with each other.

One of the many reasons I love today's poem is that in the idea of new life there is

old life.

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