flipflop_diva

Growing up, I was always slightly envious of my friends who had huge extended families. One of my best friends had so many cousins, she could barely keep track of all their names. Another friend went to a family reunion one summer with almost two hundred people.

To me, that was insane and beyond imagination, and I always wondered what that would be like.

Our family was very small, especially when I was a kid. It was basically my parents, my sister and me, and then my grandparents (my mom’s parents), who lived about a half hour away.

My mom was a nurse, and she worked part-time at the hospital in the city where we lived. But working part-time meant she wasn’t assigned a specific floor, so she floated around to wherever they needed her most. And sometimes that meant being called in for extra shifts.

Normally, she worked Thursday nights (from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m.) and every other weekend, from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. When my dad was home, he would take care of my sister and me.

(One of my most favorite childhood memories is eating hot dogs and macaroni and cheese every Saturday night that my mom worked since that was the one meal my dad knew how to cook back then. Until somewhere in the middle of elementary school when my parents bought a microwave, and my dad learned to reheat food. That was a game-changer.)

When my dad was on his business trips, we went and stayed with our grandparents, where we usually read a lot of books and played a lot of rummy and dominos, and sometimes our grandpa would let us have cookies as a late-night snack.

It was nice, looking back on it, that we got to spend so much time with them, but yet that was also pretty much the extent of our family.

My mom was an only child, so we had no aunts or uncles or multitudes of cousins from her side. My grandmother had a ton of siblings, but by the time we were born, she only talked to one or two, and even then, it was super rare. We met two of our second cousins once, but they lived far away, and there was no contact after that.

My dad had two siblings. His brother, the middle child in the family, was what my dad called “the screw-up.” He dropped out of school and got involved in drugs, and he and my dad weren’t close. He didn’t ever get married or have kids, and the only time I ever met him was when he showed up at our house out of nowhere and my dad let him stay with us for a few days.

My dad was closer to my aunt, the baby of the family, but she lived in Ohio, along with my dad’s parents, and none of them ever wanted to get on a plane to fly to California. My aunt married and had two daughters, and then ended up raising them on her own when she and her husband divorced.

We met our only two cousins for the first time when I was eight. We had a tent-trailer by then, and we took three weeks that summer driving to Ohio, picking up my cousins and driving home. I don’t remember much about that trip except there was a lot of swimming. But our cousins are a lot older than my sister and me, and we barely saw them again after that summer.

For most of my life, I never would have even recognized them if they happened to walk down the street in front of me. (Now I would, but that’s only because we’re Facebook friends.)

There are, of course, various second and third cousins and great aunts and uncles from my dad’s side of the family, but like with most of our other blood relatives, we never met them and don’t know much about them. And thus we never really considered them as part of our family. It was always just our immediate family and my mom’s parents.

Most of the time, this didn’t bother me. It just was how things were. The only time it would make me sad were those occasions when other friends talked about how big their families were. I always thought it would be nice to have that, but some things aren’t meant to be. Plus family is who you make of it. That’s what my parents always said, and we did have a lot of friends who were as close, or closer, than family.

But all of this, in the end, did lead to something.

When my dad was getting married to Sharon, who would become our stepmother, he did one thing he hadn’t ever done before — he called his sister and asked her if she would come and even bought her a plane ticket so she didn’t have to spend any money.

I was working in Central California at the time, but I had a lot of vacation left for the year, so I took off a week to come help my dad and Sharon get ready for the wedding, which they were having in their backyard. I went with my dad the day after I arrived to pick up my Aunt Ann, as we called her, from the airport.

For the next few days, I spent most of my time with my aunt and with Sharon. We cleaned and decorated the house. We trimmed and cut flowers and made bouquets. We went shopping for last-minute items. And through all of it, I finally got a chance to really meet my aunt — to talk to her and learn from her and find out who she is.

I remember the night before my dad and Sharon’s wedding, sitting on the couch next to my aunt, and laughing at a story she was telling all of us. And that’s when it hit me — my aunt was an amazingly fun and cool person, and I wished it hadn’t taken until I was almost 30 before I could actually get to know her.

I made a decision right then. I didn’t tell anyone, but I knew it in my heart — I didn’t want to be the type of aunt that my future nieces and nephews only knew from Christmas presents and birthday cards. I wanted to be there, to watch them grow, to get to know them and to let them get to know me. I wanted to be someone they loved and knew without a doubt loved them and would protect them. I didn’t want to get to know them when they were already grown.

Less than a year after my dad and Sharon got married, my sister married her husband and they moved to Texas. Less than a year after that, I quit my job and followed them.

Three years later, I was there when my nephew was born. Three years after that, I was there when my niece came along. I’ve babysat them hundreds of times already. We all spend holidays together, and we go on vacation together, and we just spend time together.

And now my husband and I have Ellie (and soon to be her brother), I make sure they spend time with their aunt and uncle and cousins as well — from my side and from my husband’s.

Sometimes, I still wonder what it would have been like to grow up with so many cousins and aunts and uncles around, but most of the time now, I’m just grateful to be so near to the people I love, and I know enough to never take that for granted.

Non-fiction.

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