mirror mirror

previously published by me elsewhere:

Growing up, an arms length or more was kept between my immediate family and my extended family. It's all part of the inner family lore as to the melodramatic twists and turns that created this situation, but what resulted was a small, sad huddle of five displaced individuals hoping this was the group whose membership we sought.

In our own ways my brother, sister, and I have been reeling from this familial awkwardness ever since. My brother has created a small tribe to call his own and my sister has made sporadic attempts at reconnecting with the outer branches of our genetic foliage. One of those efforts happened this week according to an e-mail that floated into my inbox. My sister forwarded a page and a half long treatise from one of our horde of long-lost cousins, updating her on the current goings-on of what possibly accounts for thirty people. It almost felt like something fresh from the Associated Press.

I've gotten similar deals stuffed into Christmas cards, bringing me visions of the assembly line procedure that it must entail to go along with those sugarplums already taking up residence. My first reaction should be to use the return e-mail address to stamp out some semblance of an update from here, but I've been down this lovely trail before. It must have been three years ago when my sister felt the inclination to reconnect, only to have a disappointing M.I.A. situation on her hands. I tried too, but two e-mails later and it was over again.

It's frustrating to me, this D.N.A. I feel driven to build on a foundation built of literal building blocks, since the bulk of the memories any of this family has of me were when I played with those wooden wonders of grade school. If my brother feels the need to over-populate and my sister uses her birth month as a line of demarcation for catching up, this nametag required family deal leaves me reconsidering what the hell that word really means anyway.