family
giving thanks for my family from childhood to now
When I was a child, I thought every family was like mine. I just assumed that everyone had a loving, close family with a ton of relatives who all lived near each other. This was my normal, surely it was everyone else’s, too.
Of course, that wasn’t the case, and my young mind was blown when the girl across the street told me she only had one cousin. I felt bad for her, like she was being deprived of the blissful family life I had. I didn’t put it together until later that her family life was normal for her; that my own family’s size and boisterousness and togetherness was a foreign concept to her, and she liked the way her family was just fine.
I grew up in what we referred to as “the compound.” We lived across the street from my grandparents’ house, which was nestled between cousins on both the left and right. The backyards were all connected, and we roamed between four houses like we were on a campus. We had more aunts and uncles around the block and down the street. We were everywhere.
Sundays were for family. I hung out with my cousins after school most days, and always on the weekend, but Sundays were special. We all - every one of us - gathered at grandma’s house (which is now my house) late Sunday afternoon. While the kids ran around the house and played on the sprawling front lawn, the aunts gathered in the kitchen to prepare the meatballs and gravy (it’s always gravy on Long Island) and whatever other food was on the menu that afternoon. We’d eat at a little after four, after my uncle got home from working at his deli. The adults ate in the dining room, the kids at the kitchen table.
That kitchen table was where I learned so many things from older cousins; off color jokes, curse words, the plots of tv shows we weren’t allowed to watch, and most importantly, what they were listening to. It was at a Sunday dinner when my cousin introduced me to the Grateful Dead. I listened to them banter and I learned what middle school and high school were like. I couldn’t wait to get older and live their experiences. They made life as a teenager sound so cool.
Sometimes grandpa would join the kids table. This is where I learned to drink. He’d cut up apples and peaches and put them in a very small glass of red wine and let us drink it under the pretense that it was a fruit drink. Or he’d add a little wine to our Coke and we’d drink that. I would immediately end up with a headache - red wine does that to me to this day - but I always drank what grandpa put in front of me because it felt special and sacred. He always gave us our wine when grandma wasn’t looking. It was our secret, until it wasn’t.
Sometimes I would invite a friend over to join us for Sunday dinner or a holiday gathering and they were always amazed at how we operated. When I got over thinking that every family was like that, I began to think that we were one of a kind, based on the reaction of friends. It felt special, like we had something extraordinary, and I wanted to hang onto it for as long as I could.
I was afraid that as we got older, the Sunday rituals would disappear. But we kept at it, all through my adolescence, all through high school, we gathered every single Sunday to break bread with our extended family. We graduated from playing football on the lawn to smoking cigarettes and weed behind the garage, but we stayed together. My cousins were my best friends. My family was my community.
Of course, nothing gold can stay. Once we all had jobs and lives that didn’t allow for hours spent at grandma’s house, we started to drift. The number of people sitting at the dining room table dwindled. We still got together for Easter and Christmas and our annual 4th of July barbecue celebrating grandpa’s birthday, but at some point the Sunday dinners stopped. We all got married, had kids, had in-laws we needed to see on holidays, and as our family expanded, it also fragmented. Wedding and funerals became our meeting point. We’d always say how we should get together more often, that we should make plans for a big get together or something, but it never happened.
We held on to our Christmas Eve tradition the longest, but what used to be a large party with kids running around and Santa and a wee hours card game after the older people left turned into a small circle of us eating and exchanging presents then rushing to get home. Our last Christmas Eve together was 2019; Covid came for us in 2020 and with that, we were done.
My idea of family is made up of these memories. But I learned as I got older that it was the idea of my family I carried around. All families are different, of course. And I respect that they are not all close and loving, they don’t all gather for holidays, they don’t all talk to each other every day like I do with my immediate family. You can be a family with two people or with twenty.
I’m lucky and blessed to have what I have. My immediate family is supportive and kind, they are funny and gregarious. We rarely have arguments. And we love getting together, especially for a big dinner. It doesn’t matter that it’s not all cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents like it was growing up. We’ve made our own little tribe, and I’m so happy with that. When my sister Lisa comes with her family from Rhode Island we make a weekend of it. We play cards, we watch hockey together, we eat from morning until night, we laugh and enjoy each other’s company. My parents’ dining room table is big enough for all of us and sometimes when we are sitting around the table eating and talking, I’m reminded of the Sundays at grandma’s house. It’s always a warm memory.
Lisa was here this weekend and we had an early Thanksgiving dinner because they can’t come that weekend. We did our tradition of going around the table say what we are thankful for and when it came time for my turn, I just said one word: family. It sounds like a cheap answer, but I meant that from the bottom of my heart. I am forever thankful for what I have, and what we had once upon a time.