Category — Family Circle

Hey Internet buddies! I got tagged for the Six Random Things About Me meme a while back. I’ve hesitated about participating because I blurt so damned much about myself that I wonder what I *haven’t* said already. And all the blurty things I usually think of are soooo unflattering (like wondering if I got a boob job whether that would perk The Gals up or just weight them down further in their slide toward my waist).

But I feel silly today, so here goes:

1. I can write backwards. And upside down.
2. I love to get the tweezers and pluck my husband’s stray hairs. Now when I stand next to a man and see the sunlight glinting off his ear sproutage, I just think, “Aw, what’s the matter — doesn’t anyone love you?”
3. I have absolutely zero talent at styling my daughters’ hair and never have. My 18-year-old still remembers when I seared the tip of her tender ear with a curling iron WHEN SHE WAS THREE.
4. I can’t stand for anyone to touch my bellybutton, and I get absolutely weak-kneed squicked out if I see people touch theirs. (Imagine how well I did with ultrasounds when I was pregnant.)
   

   Photo credit: whimsical truth

5. I can’t snap my fingers with my left hand. The right, sure. But the leftie just won’t work that way.
6. UPDATED to add #6, since one of my random things is that I apparently can’t count.

I don’t tag others very often, so I’ll just invite anyone who likes to participate to have at it. Here are the meme rules if you want to play along:

• Link to the person who tagged you.
• Post the rules on your blog.
• Write six random things about yourself.
• Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
• Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.
• Let your tagger know when your blog entry is up.

C’mon — get random with me. :o)

A distant member of my family died. We were not close and I hadn’t seen her in years, but it matters to me that she’s gone. Especially that she suffered and despaired and killed herself.

It’s weird that I keep thinking, “This branch of my family has hurt too much.” As if any family has an allotment of just X amount of sorrow and they’ve been served more than their fair share. But it feels that way. This one branch of my family tree has lost two adult daughters — one to a wreck and another to suicide — and their grandmother to cancer.

Of course people die, and it never seems fair or timely. But three shortened lives are hard, hard blows to bear.

As I get older and walk further away from my childhood religious faith, the stark ending of a life without hope of a hereafter is a piercing thought, too. I can understand why people choose to have faith in God. It must be comforting. I’m glad my family has that.

And how selfish of me, among these thoughts, to feel a pinch of resentment and hurt that no one in the family — even those in touch with me by email — thought to mention this woman’s death, when she died nearly two weeks ago. I happened to read about it in my hometown paper. Are we so far out of their hearts and minds that they think we wouldn’t care to know?

They had other things on their minds, I know. The shock of suicide. The grief that follows. But still. Two weeks.

In recent years, an elderly aunt on my father’s side also died after an extended illness. We only heard about it many months later, so that’s when I got the hometown newspaper subscription so I wouldn’t be quite so out of touch. And yet when I read about the death of this second-cousin-by-marriage, it still hammered me.

And earlier, back when my 10-year-old was a baby, my former stepfather died of lung and stomach cancer. My mom and he remained close after the divorce, and she had just spoken to one of his sons the previous week, giving them our phone number and address to contact us if he worsened. No one told us of his death either. Mom found out when she called the hospice to check on him and was told that he was no longer a resident. He’d died days before and the funeral had already happened.

I understand some things, but I will never, ever forgive my callous stepbrothers for how it hurt my mother, not to be able to attend Doug’s funeral.

As for my mom’s side of the family, I’ve talked about organizing a reunion once a year so we’ll all be able to catch up. I don’t know if it will happen. I’m sure my extended family has the same problems I do: I’m already drowning in the tedious, happy, and stressful details of my own life with two kids, health problems, a live-in elderly mom, money scarcity, conflicting goals and priorities, and too little time. Not sure I could stand to add one more thing to my list, any more than I’m sure I can afford to ignore this.

Maybe I should just accept that my father’s family and my mother’s family are just not close-knit anymore. Or maybe I should just suck it up and see what difference I can make. I don’t know which way I’ll go.

What do you do with choices like this in your life?

Love is not just in the big investments — buying you a car or paying for your college education. And it’s not just in the “right” answer to questions like, “If both of us were drowning and you could save only one, who would it be?” or in making sweeping declarations of, “I love you so much, I would die for you.”

It’s also in the small, homely gestures. Like the fact that my husband does laundry on his days off and hangs my hand-washed hosiery to dry on the shower door, or how he brings me the paper each morning because he knows I like to read the funnies while I’m doing my makeup. And the fact that I’m dragging my non-morning-person butt out of bed at 4:30 a.m. again to shower and get dressed and be ready to take my daughter to before-school tutoring at 5:45. And that — on my way to an insanely early work day — I’m stopping by the drugstore to pick up some makeup she mentioned needing last night; not that she would remember it by tonight, anyway, but because she asked something reasonable and I can say “Yes.”

And because she’ll feel a warm little spark when she sees the package on the bathroom counter tonight and will know she’s remembered and loved.

What small acts of love have you given and received today? I’d like to know. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy when I see someone’s thoughtfulness for another.

Photo credit: JerryZz

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