The Ties That Bind

My older older brother and his lovely wife recently dropped in for a visit so short there was no point in them adapting to another time zone. A couple of weeks before they arrived, my older sister put out an email saying they’d been in touch with her and hoped to connect with as many of us as they could while they were here—a trickier notion than it sounds, as three of the four west coast siblings still work and the visit was smack dab in the middle of a workweek. Big Sis suggested an early evening potluck at her place. No problem since, while a couple of us live in the sticks, we all work in town. Why not stop by before heading to our respective homes?

I naively assumed the gathering at Big Sis’s place would be attended by the siblings and perhaps our significant others. I couldn’t imagine my parents tackling rush hour traffic so late in the day, and though we love our nieces and nephews, how big a bash was this going to be? I admit, I hoped for something more intimate. I am an introvert. Large social occasions intimidate me and, as my wee sister observed one day at coffee, “when all the Greigs get together, we can be kind of overwhelming.”

No kidding. My parents arrived with my older older brother and, as staggered quitting times came and went, a steady trickle of siblings, spouses, sons, daughters, sons and daughters’ spouses and their children soon had Big Sister’s house full to bursting. What my mother innocently terms her “small family” has erupted into a group not quite large enough to claim village status!

Make no mistake. I love my family. I am the luckiest daughter/sister/aunt in the world. Wee Sis asked me in high school what was wrong with us because we liked our parents. My mother has often said how surprised she was to discover that her family was not as normal as she believed. Didn’t every family get along as well as we did? We’ve had drama, of course. We’ve had sibling squabbles and growing pains and tragedies like any other clan, but on the  whole, we’ve stayed together even into the kids’ adulthood. I mean, the Big Guys are all in their sixties now! Conversation might be a little awkward to start with, but we compensate with lots of hugs until we gain traction and suddenly it’s as if we were never parted. I have every confidence that my siblings and I will remain close even after our parents have moved on. We won’t see each other every day, but we don’t do that now. What we do do is remember we were raised by parents who taught us the importance of family, of the privilege of belonging to something greater than ourselves, and the responsibility we have to keep that going so in the end, none of us will ever be alone.

The mob at Big Sister’s place last week was as raucous and chaotic as I’d feared it would be ... and I’m so glad I was there. It’s magical to be part of something so overwhelming.

With love,