(no subject)

[labellementeuse]

Wedding: bizarrely, total blast, complete with panicked dress-, shoe- and pantihose-shopping town hours before the event. Also included: all seven boys of my father's family, together again for the very first time for the first time since my poppa's funeral! Embarassing and inappropriate toast by one of said brothers featuring the phrase "Garth's sexuality was in question"! (In all fairness, he is 37, but still.) The wine-fueled emotional breakdown of one cousin who just split with her boyfriend! Very, very bad dancing! Six brothers on the same dance floor at one time, including Glen (who's deaf, so, you know, doesn't dance that much.)! Several cousins I haven't seen for seven years, including one I failed to recognise! (I last saw her when she was 8 and she's 14 now. So sue me.)

But it was actually really good. We were missing nine cousins (Glen's five kids, my brothers and my sister, and Josie who was fighting with her Dad until very very recently so couldn't get down.) but, you know, it was great to catch up with the ones who could make it - including my very youngest cousin who is about eight months old and he's just the bonniest baby - loves attention, going to be a real drama king, but a sweetie and very handsome. It was really funny to see one of my cousins with him, actually, because this cousin's about seventeen and works in construction, you know, and here he is holding this baby and making kissy faces and basically melting all over it. Cute! Of course, I failed to meet either the bride or my step-cousin, her nine year old boy not from a previous marriage. (Scandal! by my family's standards anyway. But Garth seems to adore him and he was a big part of the very small ceremony - and I mean really small, neither best man nor bridesmaids.) Also, I adored my dress, so I felt confident which is absolutely vital to deal with my father's family.

I'm a bit worried about my nana, who's turning 80 in october - she was having a lot of trouble standing and she was pretty quiet, although she's never exactly been a raver, but still, you know, totally different from my grandma who's insanely active. :(

The thing that looking at my father's family tells me is that I never wanna get that far away from my brothers (or my sister.) There are seven brothers and, apart from weddings and funerals, most of them barely see each other. The family dynamic is such that my mother sometimes feels like the odd one out because she didn't change her freakin' name when she got married. I overheard my dad telling someone that way back in the day, when I was quite young, the four oldest - Neil, Chris, Dad and Murray - used to see each other quite often because Jan Neil's wife, Val Chris' wife, my Mum and Pearl Murray's wife used to get on really well. But when Jan died and Chris and Val split up soon after, it kind of fell apart. And it just struck me that that was so sad - that they used to see each other because their wives were friends, not because they gave a damn about each other. And, sure, a lot of them disagree about everything - I personally think my Dad's the only one with any brains and he's definitely the only one with a social conscience - but, jeeze. I'd hate to think that if me and Rewi ever voted differently we'd stop getting along, you know?

*sigh* Blah, blah, introspection sucks.

Comments

[bad-mushroom.livejournal.com]

Ah, large families. Such a great exercise for the introspection muscle. My huge family is Italian Catholic and consists of over twenty cousins, so they're almost so outrageous so as to be unbelievable. Thus, I often have trouble taking their various degrees of disapproval seriously. Ah well.

Funny thing about the "my mother kept her maiden name" thing...you know who minds most about that in my family? My mother's younger brothers, that's who. WTF?