Playing a game at writer's group, designed as a team building and as a getting to know you exercise, became a great way to germinate ideas.
My sons have red hair...
I've been bucked by a horse...
I enjoy sonnets...
My dad and my step dad are first cousins. No really. Making a longer story short for the sake of , well, my attempt at humor, my mom simply re-married back into the same family. No, it wasn't what you might be thinking. Not at all. It sure does make life interesting.
Yes there were occasional awkward moments, like that big family group picture at my high school graduation (NOW we laugh!). Or the time my mom tried to save and e-mail pictures on her computer and suddenly had the "2 dads" picture on her desk-top. It's a picture of one dad holding the other (an infant) presumably taken by one of their mothers, who were of course sisters. This incident prompted my brother to answer mom's voicemail with "Mother! Desktop wallpaper is NOT an emergency." In this case he may have been wrong. One of the great benefits to my brother and I was perhaps a larger opportunity to know and spend time with our grandparents, who adored my mom and their nephew.
As a kid, when the five of us sibs & steps were all together, observers always thought that I was one of the older group and that my brother was my dark-haired mom's only biological child. From 5th grade on I nearly always had a perm (yes, the spiral too) which matched me up with the older sibs and dad. I look back at pics from Christmases and station wagon vacations, and I see it immediately. Genetics is a funny thing.
It's frequently been a sport in my family to get out old (and newer) pictures and play the "They look like...." game. I'm not sure why. Most people I know do that with the newest baby in the family. We do it for decades. A friend told me my son resembles my great-grandfather, and he's named after a different one, but his personality is definitely all his own. It's not just true of my children that 3 people raised by the same parents and with similar tradition and experiences can be such very different individuals. None of my siblings have what I would classify as anything stunningly in common, but which group of siblings have? Most of us are Democrats, some of us love to read, we're not all married, we don't all have kids. We don't all live in our home town.
One of my greatest regrets is that we all aren't closer, because with parents, and certainly aging parents, it seems it would be a benefit to have a few more people around, not just to share the coming responsibility, but to share memories and make a few new ones. For a multitude of reasons (I did say there are 5 of us), this isn't likely to happen, and it's not something I necessarily mourn, just one of those "in an ideal world" lingering thoughts. Something that comes up when a friend goes out to lunch with a sister or the entire family gathers for Christmas or a crisis.
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