As extended families go, mine is large. And quirky.
My dad comes from a family of twelve, and they have, for the most part, gone forth and multiplied. In addition to the myriad “auxiliary” folks who have been folded into the clan, my dad’s dad has 10 kids, 22 grandchildren, and going on 10 greats, with more than half of the grandkids yet to weigh in on that issue – some of them due to the fact that they have yet to menstruate and/or produce live sperm, and some of them, like me, just because they... haven’t yet.
We have all kinds of family units in our bunch. Interestingly, the standard mom/dad/1.5 kids/dog variety is fairly underrepresented. We’ve got a handful of married couples sans kids, and your basic shacking up is also healthily represented. And then there are the somewhat unconventional arrangements: we’ve got two sisters who own a house together and largely raise the two grandchildren of one of them, with varying amounts of input from the kids’ mom. We’ve got an unhappily divorced dad and his two kids sharing a home with the family patriarch. And there’s the odd-in-anyone’s-book situation of Cousin, Ex-Girlfriend, Their Mutual Son, and Ex-Girlfriend’s New Boyfriend living under one roof. We’ve got the “single dad… at least while mom is in rehab” constellation, too. And one instance of “living mostly on a fishing boat in Alaska but visiting the long-time girlfriend a lot, too.”
I could mention race and religion – we’ve got several of each of those, too.
My only-slightly-unconventional arrangement of being single at age 30 and living with 3 guys and another girl in a rented house has got nothing on these folks.
1 comment:
That's nothing. Tonight I was dining with a friend, and by the end of the conversation we had engaged in a serious discussion of her grandmother's boyfriend's "Schooner." Oy veh!
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