The Shapes of Families

Having been married four times has given me a unique view into different families. When you marry, you don’t just marry a person; the whole family gets brought into the picture, if not because you spend a lot of time with them, then because the shape of the family affects the shape of the person you married. I tend to look for patterns in many things. Most birthdays in my family, for example, are on or after the 20th of a month. Very few of us were born in the beginning of any month. My grandfather (I only had relatives on my mother’s side) was born in 1888. There was not another birth in the family in a year ending in double numbers until my cousin and I had our second children in 1977. In 1988, one hundred years after my grandfather was born, we had three children born. In 1999, my first grandson was born. No one was born in 2000 or in 2011. We’ll see what happens in 2022.

Anyway, that shows that I look for patterns in things, and I had a chance to watch patterns in families when I was part of each of them. Because of my mother’s fragile mental health, I was particularly close to my grandmother and my mother’s older sister, who lived very close to each other. Several times in my first eleven years, when my mother was in the hospital, I lived with my aunt and grandmother, and I ended up closer to them than I was to my biological mother. I never saw my mother from the age of four days to when I was nine months old, and by then, she was a stranger, and I had bonded with the two women who cared for and loved me. 35 years later, I finally realized why I was so sensitive to…