Family

Attending my parent’s 40th wedding anniversary over the weeked was a very odd experience. It all went well, don’t get me wrong, but it was still strange.
Most of it, really, is down to just the way my family is. We’re not really a close family in many ways, and while I do stay in (fairly) regular contact with my parents (a phone call every couple of weeks, usually) and my brother (a text message every couple of weeks, and we see each other about once a year, usually) I don’t see the rest of them from one year to the next. And usually less than that.
So seeing pretty much all of them at once was deeply weird. And trying to remember names in order to introduce them to Herself was, frankly, a process that was always pretty well doomed. I got so many wrong, mainly by giving them the names of their siblings, which isn’t as bad as it could be (calling one great-uncle by the name of the other great-uncle, now deceased for three years was about as bad as it got – but still pretty bad!) but still fairly galling and embarassing.
The very strange ones, though, were my cousins, who (we worked out) I hadn’t seen in about ten years, if not more. Time flies, and all that crap. Having at least one complete stranger come up to me, know my name, know the basics of what I’d been up to, and having NO clue who they were at all – only for my brother to later confirm that he was one of my cousins – was pretty much the high/low point of the day. Mind you, at least I was honest, and said to him that I hadn’t a clue who he was – although I dont think he believed me.
But it made me think a lot about family, and about my role within it. I can’t deny, I’ve always been pretty much the black sheep of the lot, the one who’s not in touch, and has no intention of changing that. But at the same time, it now feels kind of weird to be so out of touch with my relatives. All the cousins now have partners, and in a couple of cases children – but I couldn’t tell you their names if my life depended on it. Only one comes to memory, and that’s because it’s a bloody horrible name, for which the kid will most likely be soundly beaten throughout his school days. As for the various partners, nope, not a clue.
I couldn’t tell you what the various birthdays are, or ages – hell, I have to make an effort to figure out my brother’s age (30 next year – heh) – nor could I tell you even where most of them live. Yeah, OK, I know the towns where they live, but addresses? Forget it.
And yet they all seem to know what I’m up to, where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, and the like. I assume my mother must do some information dispersal about that, but it’s still weird, where they know what I’m doing, and I don’t know (and, to be honest, don’t really care) what they’re doing from one year to the next. Or indeed in some cases from one decade to the next.
Still, it all went OK, and it meant I got to take a fair number of photos as well ( willing / unknowing audiences are great) which I’ll also get prints of, and send them to the parents. Well, once I’ve edited them, and got rid of the crap ones. (I know there’s a couple of those, for sure)