Adoption STAR staff member Zenobia (Nobie) Fried offers her take on what defines a family.
Nobie was interviewed for a TODAY.COM ARTICLE about her family’s recent adoption and her stick figure drawing speech. Here is a copy of Zenobia Fried’s words that she delivered to her high school speech class.
“A worn piece of paper with 12 stick figures in the middle and some red crayon at the top. Doesn’t seem like much, right? Well, wrong. These 12 stick figures are me and my family – and my family is the farthest thing from normal.
I don’t share DNA with most of my siblings and we all look really different. Well, we all are really different. We are not all the same color, we don’t all have 46 chromosomes, and some of us arrived a little later than others.
I’m the youngest out of 10 kids and if you’re confused that means I’ve got nine siblings. Like all families, me and my siblings joke with our parents by asking who their favorite kid is. I’m pretty sure my parents are the only parents in approximately a 50-mile radius that can respond with the phrase, “You’re all top 10!” Funny, right? Yeah it’s hilarious.
I get asked this question a lot: How many of your siblings are real? I usually just smile and respond, “All of them.” The person who asked this question usually gets frustrated and says something along the lines of, “You know what I mean.” But, no I don’t. All of my siblings are real. We may not all come from the same state, country, or even parents, but we all have one thing in common … we are a family and the color of our skin, the amount of chromosomes in our body, or what woman we came out of, doesn’t get in the way of that.
Family is not always blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs. The ones who love you no matter what.
This is my family
