Sunday, March 20, 2011

Familys are Forever... ish

My Mom got married this week.

I found out thanks to facebook.
Well, actually I found out from my brother texting me telling me to look at facebook.
He found out from one of his friends texting him telling him to look at facebook.
Honest to Zeus truth.

To be fair, she had told us kids that she was getting married sometime in the middle of March.
To be fair, she's been saying she was getting married "sometime soon" for six months. How were we to know she meant it this time?

My grandmother is very big into genealogy. When I was young she used to pay me a few extra bucks to read aloud old birth and death certificates while she copied the info onto sheets and sheets of family trees. She would show me furniture around her house and have me recite the ancestors it belonged to. For better or worse she installed a strong sense of the importance of family in me.

So it's weird to suddenly wake up one morning, look at my phone and discover not only do I have a step dad, but also six step siblings. Who I've never met. It would be easy to say it's not a huge deal, I'm an adult, I don't live at home, none of my siblings live with my mother, so nothing has really changed. But my sense of family is disturbed.Will we spend christmas together? Am I expected to remember their birthdays?

Or hell, maybe I should know their names first.

I'm not sure what to do with these new people. I feel like I should reach out, get to know them. I mean, they are family now, right? But what do I say?
"Hey, your dad married my mom. Let's be friends".

Right.

One of my step sisters sent me a facebook request tonight.
Silly me, why didn't I think of that?

In November Tyson got married. That simple act expanded our family by one.



Now our family is even bigger. By a lot.

We're going to need a wider lense

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