Family Ties- unraveling thereof

I have two remaining sisters. One is the very picture of stable and reliable. She's been married for 30 years or so and has three kids and a few grandbabies. They live about 20 minutes from us, and I haven't seen her since last Christmas, some due to Covid but she's busy with her life and kids and grandkids.

Other sister lives about 30 minutes away the other direction. We saw her last Christmas, and I'm pretty sure I won't see her again for a while. She recently married a crazy racist a$$hole and I don't want anything to do with him. We skipped their wedding. My excuse was going to be Covid, but then sister said it was going to small and outdoors, and I finally had to tell her we weren't coming because of her husband's racist bull$hit. The conversation ended quickly. We did send flowers to the wedding, but I think that relationship is fractured, which is fine.

I have one cousin on my dad's side, and we're Facebook and text friends. I have four cousins on my mom's side, and we haven't seen or talked to them since their mom died a few years ago.

My wife doesn't have anything to do with her cousins, and her sisters' families are pretty much the opposite of us when it comes to politics and social issues, so we don't see them very much either.

We are thankful for some friends who have similar family issues as us, as we're all kind of each other's families now.

 

My wife and I talk about this quite a bit. Our families are so different. Everybody is close on her side. She had a great relationship with her father, who died about 15 years ago, and is incredibly close to her mother and her two sisters. She's got one cousin she is particularly close to, but even the part of the family that lives in California still stays connected as best they can. One reason we moved here about 16 years ago was to be close to my wife's parents and sisters. They all live within 15 minutes of us, while my family was scattered.

My mother's family was tight-knit, but most of them are gone, including my mother. I still speak with my mother's cousin, who was always like an uncle to me, but that's about it. My father and I were never particularly close, and he has been dead for 20 years. It's not that we didn't love one another. We were just very different people. My older brother, on the other hand, simply was not a good person. Some of that was an addiction to painkillers, Some of it was just being a selfish idiot. He was on his way to his second divorce and his own children weren't even speaking to him when he died a little over a year ago. I still have an aunt and a couple of cousins I keep in touch with on that side of the family, but no one I'm very close to.

The bright spot in all this is my half brother. When I was in high school, my father had a child with a woman half his age. He is actually a few months younger than his own nephew, my brother's oldest son. Our father died when he was only 10, and his mother is a disaster, yet he somehow grew into a good man who has his shit together. My little brother and I haven't lived in the same state since he was two, but we slowly built a strong relationship as adults. His wife is great and their two little ones are beyond adorable. I've only gotten to see the baby they had in April once due to COVID, but we talk often, and we Facetime with the little ones.

To me, that is just a reminder that the family that matters is the family we choose. The brother I grew up with was all but dead to me before he died. The living relative I'm closest to is the brother I barely saw when he was a child. I've got friends who more like family to me than most of my relatives. I don't think we need to be close to our blood relatives as long as we have people who are truly family to us.

 

My family doesn’t laugh at my jokes.

 

The two sides of my family are almost polar opposites. Dad's side of the family is spread across the Mountain West, with only dad holding down the fort in the small town where he and his siblings grew up. There's a family text thread, and people stay in regular Facebook contact. Reunions were a regular occurrence until recently due to Covid-19 and both grandparents dying within a year of each other. Everyone seems to like each other and is quick to offer help if someone gets in a tight spot.

Mom's side of the family all lives in the same metropolitan area and absolutely hates each other. As best I can tell, they only communicate by text. The only regular get-together each year was Christmas -- and that with much mumbled complaining -- but with that grandma dying in August even that seems unlikely to continue. Grandpa on that side died in the mid-90s. I can't recall seeing anyone further out than my aunt and uncle on this side in the past couple decades, even at weddings and funerals.

I don't know if this lends any credence to familiarity breeding contempt or absence making the heart grow fonder. I do know I do my best to stay in touch with my siblings, lest we end up like my mom and hers. Google messaging, Skype, email, and Steam seem to do the trick. My other siblings all live within a six-hour drive of both parents, which is fortunate since I've been at least 10 hours of flying away since 2007 or so. The events of this past August drove home the great and terrible aspects of my life as a leaf on the wind.

Hard to say whether my anecdotal experience supports or refutes QT's argument; seems like interpersonal dynamics and economic circumstances would have at least as much to say on whether and how far people move away from their families. Long-distance travel is as easy as it's ever been (technologically speaking, anyway, pandemic nothwithstanding), and with the rise of VOIP and other IT innovations there are more ways to stay in touch from a distance. Even so, it doesn't appear as if all that many people are moving far away from home. If there is a primary force behind fraying family ties, I'm not sure distance is the primary suspect.
The Typical American Lives Only 18 Miles From Mom (Published 2015)

 

Almost nobody left in our families.

Brothers and I get along fine. Planning a little reunion this May on what would have been our dad's 94th birthday. No longer have anything to do with step-mom, however, after her behavior following our dad's death last February.

Wife has only a brother, and they've been estranged since 2015.

 

Mine thinks I am the joke.

 

I'm southern with clannish DNA, so not being close to family is completely foreign to me.
There is very little distinction between parents/aunts/uncles/siblings/cousins/nieces/nephews/great nieces and nephews.
At home, I live on a farm that has been in my family for more than a century. I live beside my parents in my grandparents house, so that means I grew up beside them. I also had a great aunt and uncle on the other side, and now a cousin lives in that house. I had an aunt and uncle across the road.
At our place at the beach, our place backs up against one of my wife's sisters, and another sister lives directly across the street.

 

This fascinates me; and by "fascinates" I mean I'm jealous AF as the woke say.

 

My father is long gone. My mother has become my child, but I am OK with that.
I have very loving much-older sisters. Somewhere along the way I sort of became their child too.

 

Scots/Irish!

I will say that sometimes it's not what it's cracked up to be. My dad is old and can't do much anymore. All he does is - between naps - sit around and think up stuff that "he" wants to do. And by that, I mean dumb stuff that I have to do while he watches and give directions.

 

Does anybody?

 

Family screw-up here. I'm alternately amused and horrified by the people who share my DNA.