Big Family Bonds

I came from a very small family unit of 5; my parents, my grandmother, my sister and I.  Family gatherings consisted of the 5 of us.  Holidays consisted of the 5 of us.  The only extended family we kept in touch with was my mother's sister and her family, but there was rarely a family gathering of the two families.  In fact, after we moved a few towns over in New York we never had a family get-together.  Since I had grown up this way, I never thought about family time being anything beyond the immediate family, fun but often quiet.  My cousins were a good 10 years older than me and they are really complete strangers to me to this day. 

Somehow every man I ever dated came from a very large family.  My high school sweetheart was one of 7 children, whose parents were also from large families.  As each married and had children, their family increased by leaps and bounds and they all kept in close contact.  Family gatherings with his family often seemed chaotic and loud to me.  There were the typical squabbles between siblings and cousins, but there was always someone else to turn to for companionship and support.  There always seemed to be camaraderie and a level of gaiety that was lacking in my family.  I didn't particularly like my sister, loved her, but didn't always like her.  It made for a lonely existence sometimes.

In my mid 20's I became involved with another man who came from a large family, he was one of 6 children.  His siblings were spread out throughout the east coast, and his parents were divorced with one in Florida and one in New Hampshire, so his family gatherings were more limited, but still filled with far more chaos and activity than anything I experienced with my family.  I recall in particular when his younger brother married into the Spaulding family (yes, the Spaulding family of sports gear fame).  The wedding was enormous.  The party lasted 4 days.  I was overwhelmed. 

I married a man who came from a family of 5 children.  His youth was filled with terrible dysfunction, yet the family still gathered for every occasion.  Joint summer BBQ's, birthday parties, anniversary parties were normal for his family.  Siblings and cousins intermingled on a regular basis.  Each occasion saw at least 20 people bustling around, talking and laughing, exchanging stories of their crazy childhood that now seemed somehow humorous.   Even in my misery I marveled at the ability of this family to stay connected, to find common ground where they could put aside old hurts and make a few hours pass pleasantly. 

After my divorce, my home life consisted of myself and my 3 children.  For a while I made a point of keeping close ties with my sister and her two children.  Still our extended family only consisted of 11 of us, then my grandmother passed away and my sister divorced and we were down to 9.   We saw each other frequently until my sister chose a disastrous path that split up the family.  We were never really a huggy, boisterous bunch.  Family time was still a relatively quiet affair in my family.   Although my children have spent more time with their cousins than I ever did with mine, they don't have the bond that I've seen in the other families I've had the privilege of knowing. 

The bonds made by spending time together are irreplaceable.  Joining my S.O. on a trip to New Jersey for a family reunion recently reminded me of this.  My S.O. walked into a room full of loud, boisterous Poles (as in people of Polish decent) and was warmly greeted and welcomed by family members he hadn't seen in many years, some as long as 30 years:  cousins he'd spent summer vacations with as children, Aunts and Uncles who had opened up their homes every Holiday, relatives who his parents had "forced" him to spend nearly every weekend with.  They all greeted him as if 20 or 30 years hadn't passed.  They packed a room fit for 150 people. My S.O. commented that this was only his father's side of the family.  There were probably as many on his mother's side.  My S.O. himself is one of 6 siblings with each sibling having 3 or 4 children of their own.  The size of this family, and the bonds that still existed between many of them, astonished me. 

As inspiring as this event was for me, it also reminded me of how much of this kind of extended family bonding is becoming a thing of the past.  While I saw one teenage boy get up to dance with his mother, I saw only one other teenager in attendance and she was busy texting and listening to her i-pod.   Children have far more to keep them busy with cell phones, i-pods, computers and video games capturing their interests in ways family cannot.  It has become hard enough to get children to sit to dinner with their immediate family, let alone try to coax them into giving up a Saturday afternoon to a family function.  I'm sure learning to dance the polka with Mom is not top on their agendas.

Families are living further apart now too.  Long gone are the days when all the relatives can pack up the family and head over to Uncle George's house to help build a new garage.  My S.O. and his sister reminisced about just this type of thing when they were growing up.  Three of their uncles showed up every weekend to help their father rebuild his house; men swung hammers, women cooked a big spread and the children ran around the yard together.  Those children are now 40 & 50 years old and still remember those days spent together.  Having grown up in a small family myself where I don't have memories like these to draw upon, I feel that loss.  I try to convince my children that they should spend more time going to grandma and grandpa's house with me because someday they will be gone, but it has become nearly as hard to convince them to spend the time with me and each other, let alone their grandparents and cousins.  What time they relent is more often spent trying to nurture the more immediate relationships of parent/child and siblings. 

I recently took the children to South Carolina to visit their half-siblings who live there.  I look forward to making this a yearly excursion.  I am hoping the bonds started here will last a lifetime for all of them.  There is no better gift I can think of to give my children.