Growing up, I envied my friends. They all seemed to come from large, close-knit families, and I wished I had a family like that. I wanted cousins that were like siblings, grandparents that were warm and involved in my life, a bounty of people who loved and cared about me. Before I go any further, let me say up front that I am very lucky because my family loves me, my parents were able to put food on the table, clothes on my back, and didn’t beat me or abuse me. Having said that, I still had family envy.
To best illustrate WHY I have family envy, it might be best if I introduce you to my family. My dad’s side is Irish-Catholic, which takes care of the large part, but we aren’t particularly close. Dad has three sisters, who are all married with children (I think – I wouldn’t swear to it, but at least two of the three are at least), and his mother is still living. His father died right after he married my mother, which was not a statement about the marriage, but a brain aneurysm, so I never met him.< My parents had two children: me (the oldest and a girl) and my almost four year younger brother. I have been told, and I have the vaguest memories of this, that one of my dad’s sisters and her husband and kids lived with us for a while when I was very young. I think one of her children, a girl, was my age and we went trick-or-treating together. For some reason, my dad’s mother and his sisters, spouses, and children decided to follow their manifest destiny and go west when I was around four. After this, I did not see or speak to any of them again until I was in my thirties.
My dad’s mother would send my brother and me birthday cards every year, and the year that parents were trampling each other in order to get Cabbage Patch Kids, my dad’s mother sent me one! (I still have it - her name is Levina) Then one year, not long after the Cabbage Patch Kid birthday, the cards stopped. Maybe I didn’t send a thank you card or something, I don’t know. My mom didn’t do a great job instilling manners in us. We knew how to behave in public, but since we didn’t interact with other kids very much, we weren’t good with “pleases” and “thank yous” so it is entirely possible that I did not send a thank you note. I would have been eight. I’m sure my mom thanked her, since she and my mom were pen-pals.
Anyway, when I went off to college, I decided to try to get to know my dad’s family on my own. I was an adult, after all, and I could make my own way. I got everyone’s addresses (the relatives out west, and the more distantly related relatives who were spatially closer) and I sent every single family member a Christmas card, with a handwritten note, expressing my heartfelt desire to get to know them better, and my hope to hear from them soon, by the way, here’s my dorm address! I didn’t hear from one of them. Not one.
I got married a few years later, and my dad’s mother asked my mom what the colors of our bathroom were. I can only assume that she was going to knit or crochet something, since that’s something that she does. I’ll never know, since it has been eleven years since I got married, and I’ve never gotten so much as a card from her. Let me be clear: I don’t care that she didn’t send a gift, but I would have loved a card.
A few years after I got married, there was a big family reunion, and one of my dad’s sisters came, with her husband and her children (I think that was all of her children? Maybe she has more.) I was excited! Despite getting no response from any overture I had made in the past, I was sure being face to face would be different! The female cousin was happy to see me – I guess she’s the one who when trick-or-treating with me? She seemed to know an awful lot about me, and I knew nothing about her. My aunt didn’t seem to care about talking to me at all, which was a bummer, so I decided to find something to talk to her about. This aunt loves genealogy; it is a hobby and a passion. She brought the family trees (she’s done both sides of my dad’s family and some of my mom’s) for my folks to look at. I looked at my dad’s and immediately saw that my birthday was wrong. The year and month were right, but the date was off my three or four days. I told her, and she barely acknowledged that I spoke, and ignore me for the rest of the time she was there. The next year, she came back, this time with my dad’s mother. I didn’t go. My dad was angry, because he is of the belief that family is family, not matter what they do to you, or what effort you put in to the relationship. I decided differently.
My mom’s family, on the other hand, all lived in Ohio, except for my mom’s one sister. Here’s where the names are all changed for privacy’s sake, otherwise you would never follow this. My mom is one of four children. There’s William, her oldest sibling, and his wife Mary, and their daughter Diana. My mom comes next in birth order, along with her twin sister Marsha. Marsha is single, having never married and never had children. My mom’s youngest sibling is Kelly. Kelly was married to Todd, but I don’t remember him at all, because they lived out of state for most of their marriage. Kelly divorced Todd, which is just as well, since, from what I’ve heard, Todd was an abusive ass. Kelly has five children: Ann-Marie, Jack, Greg, Lisa and Amber. Lisa and I were close in age, and Diana, Amber, and my brother were all close in age.
Growing up, my mom’s family all got together once a year, at Thanksgiving. We gathered at either my house or William’s house. I think we went to Kelly’s house once when she was living in Ohio, and once at Marsha’s house. Although this was the only time the entire family got together, we would visit my mother’s parents one or two other times a year, and we saw Marsha quite often. Here is where the envy really kicked in, because I had all this family, most of it within a two hour drive, and I only saw it once a year! My friends had cousins they saw regularly, like they were built in friends. Every year I spent half of Thanksgiving Day getting over my shyness and reacquainting myself with my cousins, and by the time the day was over, I was begging my mom to let me hang out with my cousin Lisa more often, and I didn’t understand why she always said no. I was saddened by my mom’s refusal, because I always wanted a sister, and I figured my cousin Lisa was the closest thing I would ever have to one. I found out many years later that there was some bad blood between my mom and Kelly (mostly my mom holding a grudge), and that was most likely why she said no.
My mom’s mother died when I was fourteen, and we stopped getting together for Thanksgiving after that. We would still go see my mom’s father once or twice a year, but I rarely saw William or Kelly after that. My mom’s father lived into his 90s, and long enough for me to bring my husband around to see him. He wasn’t mobile enough to travel the two hours one-way to come to the ceremony, but he was able to watch the videotape. Over the years, I have seen Kelly and her kids on various occasions, but we’re still not that close. I’ve friended a few of my cousins on Facebook and Twitter, and we keep in touch that way, but for the most part we’re all content to be anti-social. Except for Kelly, because if it were up to her, we would be a close-knit family that got together on a regular basis. So, you probably think that I get together with Kelly and her kids on a regular basis. I do not. For one thing, her kids live all over the country, so it is not that easy to all get together. For another, Kelly tires me out. She's high energy and always has to be the center of attention, always talking. It's exhausting and annoying to be around her. I don't mind seeing her a couple times a year, but that's it.
My husband has two siblings, and nieces and nephews, and both parents are still living. He also has aunts and uncles. Unfortunately, they all live hours and hours away, and we see them once every three or four years. His family is a close-knit family, and I envy that.
I’ve thought about trying to forge closer ties with my mom’s family, but it’s difficult because we are so spread out geographically, and we are all so busy. My aunt Marsha, who has always been like a second mother to me, is the family member who is closest to me geographically, and we are closer now than we have ever been.
If you’ve read this far (and I have my doubts), you may be wondering about my immediate family. My dad and I don’t get along. We’re better now than we used to be. I’ve learned to just ignore the things about him that used to anger me, and he stopped being so nasty to me once I was married off and taken care of. Yes, he is that backward. He couldn’t stop worrying about my future, but not in a good parental way, in a patriarchical, sexist way, and it affected our relationship. He stopped once I had a man to take care of me, and I wasn’t his responsibility anymore. My mom and I are not as close as we used to be. Part of that is my dad’s fault, because he won’t let us talk on the phone without being a part of the conversation. He’s afraid we’re talking about him. Because they live two hours away from me, I don’t get to hang out with my mom or have mother-daughter chats like some women get to have with their mothers. My brother and I have no relationship. Nothing happened, we just have nothing in common and struggle to find anything to talk to each other about. When my parents are both gone, I have no doubt we’ll forget the other one exists.
I’m not sure what my thought was in writing this. Partly catharsis, partly sharing. I’m not convinced I’ll even post this. It’s long and boring. I guess sometimes I feel alone. You graduate college, get moving on your life, and if you didn’t make the kind of friendships that last forever, you eventually find yourself an adult, perhaps in a new place, with no friends. Making friends as an adult is HARD, so you already feel alone, and if you don’t have much family, you feel even more alone. Perhaps that’s why I wrote this, in order to express my lonely feelings. I’m not sure.
Thanks for reading this, if you did. I promise my next post will be more fun. Suggested listening for this post: The Living Years by Mike & the Mechanics.
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