My sister is coming to Seattle this afternoon to visit for five days. I just saw my mom three weeks ago, and next weekend I’m going to visit my dad in New York. Los of family time this summer.
I’ve seen or will see each of these family members alone. When Mom was here we saw her brother and sister (and my cousin) a little, but this week it will just be me and Becks and then of course next weekend just me and Dad. It somehow seems very fitting that I’d be seeing all my closest blood relatives within a six-week time span…just separately.
The last time my whole family was together in the same room was at my high school graduation dinner in 1993. The upshot of that dinner turned out to be my mom’s decision not to have contact with my dad anymore, and my sister’s and my subsequent decision to run interference for each other at future graduations. We have never gone ahead and invested in walkie-talkies so as to be able to keep in constant contact during a weekend when our parents are going to be in the same geographical location, but who knows: she’s got at least one more graduation coming up in the next couple of years and we just may at some point, the better to whisper things like “Meet me back at rendezvous point at oh six hundred, Flying Eagle” during interminable provost speeches and the like.
Anyway, things haven’t changed much since then, I don’t thing. In 1993 due to our (I’m sure very busy) high school student schedules we’d already been seeing Dad separately for various weekends in New York…and now that I think about it, I really don’t remember what I did about going to visit him while I was in college. I think I went to New York for fall break once, and maybe a time or two during the summers. Mom always came to visit me on the West Coast, as she still does, in addition to having me home in Miami pretty much whenever I want. She and my sister are living together again but as I said, Becks won’t be home when I’m home this year so this coming week will be our only time together this year. She just turned twenty-eight and is planning to kick it PacNW style full time while she’s here. I’m really excited to see her.
I have a sister, a mother, and a father, but I wouldn’t really say I have a family. I have vague recollections of my dad coming to visit us in upstate New York when I was a tiny little baby Chiara but we moved to Miami when I was about four and he was never there for long. This was very common among my friends so I never felt weird or out of place because my parents weren’t together. We used to all spend Christmas together sometimes when I was younger but that ended by the time I was fourteen or so, to the mutual relief of everyone, I think. I was enthralled with the Key Girls and with Amy at the time, spending as much time out of the house as possible, rebelling against the hippie values with which I’d been raised by spending a lot of time at church youth group when I wasn’t at play practice. Through most of high school I treated my mom and sister more like genial housemates than family members; I used to go to Marah’s family parties sometimes but I didn’t participate much in my own.
When I moved three thousand miles from home for college, I continued to try to make my family there out of my friends, at which I have had varying degrees of success in the ten or twelve intervening years. I still think of certain friends as family…whether they think of me as such, as they’ve gotten married and begun to have kids and as we’ve all grown up a little, is unclear. Often I feel most myself with those friends and I don’t feel the need for aunts and uncles and cousins and things like that. In fact I’m not totally sure what it would even be like to be part of a large family that lived all in the same area. When I went to Kalamazoo in November I got a tiny taste of what that might have been like, and of course I still remember all the big parties the Italiaan-Americans used to have in the eighties in Queens, when I was a kid. It’s all pretty unsubstantial though. It’s all speculation.
I don’t plan to have my own family in the traditional sense, like the marriage-and-kids sense. I don’t know what, really, is going to happen in my thirties with all that, as my parents get older and my friend family is smack in the middle of their child-rearing years, with maybe not much time for a well-meaning Auntie Chiara. I don’t mind being single, as in not having a life partner or whatever, but I do mind, very much, the idea of being alone, with no community or support. I wonder now if I should have spent more time with my, you know, family of origin, or if I should spend more time with the various disconnected parts of it now. It’s hard to reconcile my desire to live on the West Coast and kind of live the life I have here with a desire to have some sort of family connection. When most of my family interactions are weekend-long and involve seven-hour plane flights it’s a slightly difficult to get really motivated to have very many of them, not to mention expensive. So far I’ve tried to go for high quality rather than long duration….again, with varying degrees of success. I don’t know how or if that will change in the next couple of years.
Regardless, I’m really looking forward to Rebecca’s visit and hoping to spend some good sister time with her. So far we have lots of dinners, an outing to see bellydance, and a trip to the freakish new library. Will there be conveyor-belt sushi? Only time will tell. I hope that we can spend some good time being family together, even if I don’t have a really solid idea of what that entails.