Meet the family

My own wedding is coming in a few short months, and as a warm up, I decided to go to my sister's wedding this weekend to see how it's done. It's a long trip in the driving rain, a little scary, too, but well worth it when you know that there's a hot tub waiting for you at the end of the trip.

(Ok, so there was really no decision to make in going to this wedding. I love my sister like a, well, a sister, and I was part of the wedding party. There really was no chance that I was going to miss this if it was in my control)

My sister's wedding was the first happy occasion that Sam has "experienced" my family. You don't meet my family, you aren't introduced to them, you are thrust into a world that you've never seen the like of. Other people with large families will understand this.

Let's start with why it was a largish wedding and my desire for a smallish one being swallowed up by the desire for my family to be there. My grandmother had six children: Skip, my mom, Anthony, Jimmy, Richard, and Jonette. I don't remember a summer growing up when all of us weren't at my grandparents house at least once ever other week. When I say all of us, I mean all of us: my mom and dad and my two sisters, Skip's wife and three kids, Anthony's wife and two kids, Jonette's daughter. Two of my grandmother's sisters lived just a couple of streets over, Anna and Marie. Marie only had one son, but the three of them were always visiting on those occasions. Anna and her husband had six sons and one daughter. All of them are married. All of them have children.

All of them came to the house.

Did I mention that my grandmother had one more sister and two brothers? Auntie Jenny only had three children, Uncle Ralph had two, and Uncle Jimmy had none.

By my count, I'm up to 50 people, not including the kids that my grandmother's nieces and nephews had. Or family friends that are close enough to be considered family. This was a typical headcount for Christmas Eve. Thanksgiving the immediate families of my grandmother and her brothers and sisters fended for themselves.

And it's not like we aren't a close knit family. We really are. I look at Sam's family who gets together almost every weekend in the summer, and they're close in a similar way, but the size of the get togethers doesn't go beyond her grandparents immediate family. No great aunts or great uncles. The buck stops somewhere.

When there's a wedding or a funeral, we all show up. Every last one. The last time someone didn't show up for a funeral and then came to a family reunion, there was major, major fallout. I wasn't there to see it, but my sisters were. One of my cousins and her husband didn't show up for my mom's (their aunt's) funeral. I suspect that my sisters weren't the only ones to say something to them.

Christmas Eve still pulls us all together. So do yearly reunions. If we vacation somewhere near where a family member lives, we stop in. We don't go out of our way to avoid each other; if anything, we go out of our way to find each other.

My sister's wedding was no different. We both tried to keep it small, but that's next to impossible we discovered. If you want Auntie Anna there, you need to invite Billy and Pat, because they drive her anywhere. But if you invite Billy, you have to at least invite Jimmy, because he is mom's godson. And if you invite two Drumms, you need to invite Tommy, Johnnie, Paulie, Anne, and Mikey, otherwise you get fallout. And if you invite all of Auntie Anna's kids, you should invite Bernie, Auntie Mary's son. And since you're inviting those two Aunt's kids, you need to invite Auntie Jenny's kids, since they're the ones that host the family reunions.

But the fact is, you want to invite them anyway. There's no real feeling of obligation. You want them there.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

I don't see them nearly enough.