Family. It's not something you can choose. It's not like going into a garden, picking the most beautiful flowers, bringing them home and loving them until the end of life. It would have been so much easier that way. Family, you are born with it. It depends on the luck of each individual, because even when you don't like it anymore, you still have to be there for them. Of course, no one is going to punish you if you walk away, but there are some unwritten laws some of us just can't help following. Because we don't seem to be able to put all those years behind. Because we don't seem to be able to leave them, not even when they get on our nerves. Because we can't live with or without them. This is why, no matter how often we fight, no matter how often they put us down or how quickly we lose our temper and bash at them, none of us can or wants to give up on the other one, because these bonds can't be broken. They defy time, distance, even people, and the bloodline always brings us together again. It's how it should be, no matter how much trouble we must face for that concept to turn real.
I am eighteen years old and I have just moved to New York. I have been living with my father in Los Angeles up until now, yet I have never met my mother. I was told that she was a pole dancer who left right after she gave birth to me and left me on my father's doorstep. It all went perfectly fine until he decided to expand his business to Russia and move to Moscow. Don't get me wrong, Europe didn't sound bad at all, but I knew that my fate was different than that. I had to finish highschool, go to Yale, build a future for myself – and I preferred to do it in the United States, just the way I had started the process. This is why my father enrolled me in the Constance Billard School for Girls and arranged for me to move in with my older sister and brother and their mother, whom I had only seen once in my entire life. My name is Meredith van der Woodsen, and yes – I come from a slightly dysfunctional family.