My family and I were group texting, and one of us accidentally sent a message to an old chat. Someone who obviously has an old number belonging to one of my family members chimed in asking who we were. My sister sent a picture of herself, thinking one of us was joking and said, “Me!” We gagged because we had not yet caught on that this was not a family member. Once we realized this was an old phone number, they (the outsider) laughed, we laughed, then one of us apologized for our mistake. No biggie, right? Well because not everyone saw the message at the same time, a couple of family members replied late to the incorrect chat. The unknown chat member got upset, insulted us and asked to be removed. They began to make over the top, harsh comments before calling us weird. Now mind you, we had only said a couple of things, so I am not sure how this person determined that we were weird. Anyway, I don’t need to tell you how the rest of the conversation went before the person stopped texting. I did not understand how things got out of hand so quickly.

While I do know that calling people weird is trending, it still bothered me. Not only was I bothered because people can’t think for themselves, but I was also bothered because this person tried to label us. The crazy thing is, in those few texts, we didn’t even get down the way we usually do. We do have a way of saying things that are sometimes only understood in the family. However, the conversation this person saw in the thread was very general. There was nothing you could gather about any of us. There were no codes, no made up words, nothing! I honestly spent some time searching for the why. What was it in the way we communicated with each other that made this person believe us to be weird?

PAUSE. Check Yourself, Girl! The way we jive in our families is our thing. Since it is ours, it can’t be labeled as anything by anyone else. How in the world is that “thing” you do with your family weird, wrong or whatever? People can and may have opinions, but these days, people take their opinions as fact. This person’s opinion is definitely not fact. Unlike the word she used to describe us, weird, we are not trending. We just are. There is just something in the way we vibe. There is nothing uncanny about how we “get” each other. Who cares about whether families communicate in a certain way or in their own way with each other? The issue with this is lost on me. Communicating in a way that is different than the way you communicate is hardly supernatural or mysterious-“weird.” Then again, when you use what’s trending, you don’t even take the time to figure out what something really means. 

My hope is that the person who happened upon a glimpse of our family has a family to share what we share. It’s a little hard to describe what it is that we have, and we get that. I hope that they have something with someone that they can’t and don’t care to describe to others also. I hope that they were only taken aback by us until they realized that we were a version of something they also have and hold near and dear. If this is not the case, I am deeply sorry. Family is not weird. People having relationships that you do not understand is not weird. Attempting to make people feel bad for their relationships, their customs, their traditions and inside ways is, according to what’s trending, weird.