Friends or family?

So which one wins?  Which is better?  Friends...the 'urban family' you choose for yourself, or the group of people you were lumbered with from birth?

I guess I'm not all that 'family' oriented.  In the main I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.  My family is fragmented; my parents split at some point in my early childhood and things pootled along from there, both parents marrying again, those marriages didn't work out...and so on and so on, with several potential stepbrothers and sisters entering and leaving along the way (most of them slamming the door behind them).  That is a whole saga unto itself - if I were brave (or masochistic) enough I'd turn it into a novel.

I am now estranged from my mother as anybody reading this (is there anybody?) who knows me will of course already know.  This was one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life, though of course it isn't supposed to be and most of the people I know who have nice relationships with their parents don't tend to believe or understand it.  I don't blame them for that, and this isn't meant to sound martyrish at all.  I guess it's just there to add a bit of context.

Family-wise I'm closer now to my sisters than I have ever been.  There's something about getting older and realising that against all odds, you have actually formed some kind of a bond with those people who were there with you from the beginning, no matter how annoying you've always found them (they are two and four years younger than me so as we were growing up I'm afraid I did find them annoying in the extreme). I also have close friends with whom the bonds grow stronger with every year as I realise how much of our lives we've witnessed.  I suppose the only downside about these marvellous bonds is that they include embarrassing memories as well as lovely ones, and you can't edit those out.  Things like embarrassing crushes or that time when you went to school wearing an Easter bonnet with a bath sponge base and everybody laughed (that happened to me - it's a long story and you had to be there).  Family members are the worst for this.  I'm convinced that were I ever to actually become a famous, distinguished novelist one of my sisters would still be able to crush me by telling everybody at the book signing that up until quite recently I had no idea what a 'birthday suit' was.

So I guess new friends are good when you want to reinvent yourself, or you just want a laugh with someone who doesn't know how old you were when you finally stopped sucking your thumb.  Or that you ever sucked your thumb in the first place.  New friends are also harder to disappoint, because the closer you are to somebody and the more they know you, the easier it is to upset them or feel as though you've let them down.  It's a trade-off; you can have all the closeness but with that will come bucketloads of annoying habits and numerous ways in which you will be able to disappoint them and they you, often without even realising it.  I can understand why some people choose not to get close to anybody, because with it comes a wealth of - well, hassle.

So anyway, back to the original question - family or friends?  Heaven forbid I should sound indecisive, but I would say both, as long as they're good ones.