The Cousins

Over the weekend we had our first-ever cousin reunion. Most families have family reunions, and are lucky to have 50 people show up from the whole extended clan. We don't have numbers issues in my family. I have 35 first cousins. That's not counting their kids, or spouses, or second cousins. 35. First cousins. Thus, we rate a reunion all of our own.

The vast majority of my cousins - and aunts and uncles, for that matter - live in Emporia, Kansas. It's kind of nice to have them all so neatly corralled - if I want family, I go there. If I don't, I stay away. But, it's still nerve-wracking to visit there. It's like I'm related to the whole town.

So, we tooled on down to Emporia for the weekend. Mr. Me, not especially wanting to hang out with loads of my family, went only under duress and with the promise of major spousal "points" dangled in front of his nose. We ended up hauling the Little Man with us, as the baby care fell through. The party started about his bedtime, so the shindig started out stress-laden with the non-positive attitude of the husband and general pissed-offedness of the son.

We pull up in my cousin the hostess's drive and the first words out of my husband's mouth are "Oh my God, the cops are here already!!" upon seeing a black & white in the driveway. I had to talk him off the ledge and explain that, while that might be likely with this group, it wouldn't happen this early, and the car belonged to, you guessed it, a cousin.

Despite the rocky start to the evening, it ended up being a good time. The Little Man eventually zonked out, and I was able to successfully ignore the waves of boredom emanating from Mr. Me, and had a good time drinking and hanging with the cousins. There were over 50 people there, some them I've only seen a handful of times ever, so it was good to get to know them a little better.

I found it interesting, though, that even though we're all adults now and most have families (some have several families!), I still felt like a little tagalong, just like I did growing up. I was always one of the youngest - my oldest cousin is 18 years older than I - and I always was "too young" to do anything with the older kids. As a kid I felt left out of all the fun which, in retrospect, was probably a good thing because after hearing some of those stories, I'm truly amazed that more of them weren't jailed for the crap they pulled.

The moral of the reunion: any gathering of people from your past - whether it be family or schoolmates - is likely to return you to whatever pecking order you held back in the day. Refreshing. Yet sad.