Yesterday I went for my 3rd post-op checkup with the orthopaedic surgeon who put my ankle back together. God bless that man. Before seeing the doc however, you have to register at the main desk of the hospital where they ask you all the usual questions: name, date of birth, health card number, family doctor, primary next of kin. You would usually just sit in the chair and nod your head, while mumbling half incoherent positive responses so that you can speed through this part of the process and have so much fun waiting in the next office to which you are bound.

Not yesterday. A kind smiling woman asked me the primary next of kin question in this way: “I have {insert my husband’s name} as your PNOK, is that correct?” And a simple question like that instantly became a ton of bricks. Like I had never come to the full and complete realization that my husband, related to me by my own choice and NOT by blood, was the most important person in my life. I answered yes and sat there stunned out of the normal comfortable sanctuary of consciously knowing your world and what is in it. Suddenly, I had been dropped into a new one.

See, growing up there was a mantra amongst my nuclear and extended family – Family is all that you have, and they are most important. Only that what you might know as extended family – uncles, aunts, cousins, great-uncles, aunts, second cousins – were considered part of the nucleus to us, and loyalty was number one. Needless to say, blood is very thick in our parts.

But my husband, joined with me in the sacrament of matrimony, is closer than my mother, father, brother, aunts, uncles, cousins. Some part of me, loyal to the end even after all the betrayal, wants to believe in their high moral ground and feels guilty for disagreeing, feels guilty for siding with my husband against them. Heck, siding with myself against them!

But it doesn’t matter. Even if those named above weren’t dead, emotionally distant, half way across the world or power-hungry betrayers, liars and gossipers of the worst sort. Even if they were all the perfect model family, my husband would still be my primary next of kin. Most important. Numbero Uno. I think I understand something that I should have learned a long time ago. I think that is something they should have learned a long time ago.

The relationship between a husband and wife is thicker than blood – it is the foundation of blood.

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