Nothing funny about feldspar

I’ve been thinking about “family” lately — spurred by two things: the wedding invitation for My Sister’s Child, and the digging out of a box of photographs from my parents’ house.

My Sister’s Child is being espoused to someone I’ve never met, someone who isn’t the high-school-true-love-forever I’d met a few years ago. That’s ok, it doesn’t bother me (I don’t have MSC’s life), but it’s a TUESDAY EVENING wedding in a city 160 miles away. In this family, we’re nothing if not inconvenient.

The box of photos, however, are a different story. It’s full of not just pictures — there are a couple of scrapbooks and a pile of official-looking documents. I haven’t read through everything, but they seem to tell a story of people I never knew — my parents before they met, before they married, before they became my parents.

For instance, I have two half-sisters, one each from my father’s two previous marriages. I have pretty much always known this, but until yesterday I have never known their names. It’s not like I’m going to Google them and find them and say “Hey, Sis!” but they are almost possibly real people, now that they have names.

Then there are (likely) a whole bunch of cousins on my mother’s side — at least by name, but I’m not sure the man she called “Dad” was her father (being the offspring of a just-turned-16-year-old-unwed-mom). At the very least there are half-brothers involved, none of whom I’ve ever met.

Is this a strange family? Is it common? I don’t know. It is certainly common in my family to be estranged from relations. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have family reunions, but then again, I’m glad we don’t. It makes summer planning that much easier.