This is my family. We look pretty happy, don't we?

This isn't a rant on how terrible my life was growing up; no. This is a story about how you can still change your life, no matter how far gone you are.

Growing up, I never understood my parents. My mother left when I was only nine years old. Then, four years later, my dad left. I never could quite grasp the fact that these parents supposedly loved us, and then walked away and never looked back, never contacted us, never showed remorse for leaving. What kind of parents would do that? What kind of parents boast about their loving children, and then act like they never existed?

You see, from that point on, I learned to depend on no one else, but I still held my family values quite high on my list of priorities. I learned that Ellie was the only person I could depend on other than myself, and she proved that to me every day. For heaven sake, she was sixteen when she had to raise me. That's not fair to her.

The only other person I ever depended on was Morgan Grimes, but I think it was more him depending on me. Morgan got it. He didn't have to even speak for me to know he got it. When mom left, he sat with me and played games with me all night, trying to remind me that life doesn't always suck. He took me in on more than one occasion while Ellie was in school and I wasn't.

This is my support system.

Through them, I grew up to be the guy I am now.

With or without parents.

I learned through surviving on my own that I am my own family, and no one else. Morgan Grimes, Devon, Casey, Sarah...they're my family now. There's no changing that, no going back, there's no even questioning it. No, I don't doubt for a moment that these people would do anything to save me or Ellie...as they've proven time and again.

This is the portrait of a happy family.

Because we are happy.

We're a family, with or without the people who left us.

This is who we are.

We will never have the education that we should have had or the mother and father that we wanted, but we will always have each other. 
In conclusion, these pictures are to remind us that we are happy, that we are still alive, that we lived though a lot of shit, and that in the end we are a family that loves each other... most of the time.