: I'm looking forward to going to Southport tomorrow. It's my aunt's 80th birthday, and it's only the last year and a few weeks, since my cousin's sudden death, that that quadrant of the family has felt much need to get back in touch again with me since the late 1980s. The background is that I grew up with those cousins. My sister and I did, and they all kept in touch with one another. Starting the late '80s there was a crazy amount of family melodrama going on with that batch, and so the...
: ...drift away can kindasorta be understood. That said, I was then as I am still: the weird kid. Plus, I'm the disabled one. Everyone in the family kept somewhat up-to-date on me by way of, essentially, whatever my mother told my aunt. (I do not understand the compartmentalization of the family, but whatever.) My other cousin Johnny is at least making the effort, which I appreciate. He went though a mountain of shit for years and years, shouldering a lot of the melodrama because he was kinda...
: ...the only adult in the place, if you get my meaning. Also, I do believe my aunt has learned that my mother kept me a secret and just beyond arm's length for so long because she was, for lack of a better term, embarrassed to a degree about me and my situation. (She and my mom wear their upbringing differently.)
Families are strange, like some kind of microcosm of humanity, eh?