20180810.0430

On the Sunday just past, my wife, Ms. 8, and I attended a family reunion. My wife's family has been in Texas for a long time; her maternal family immigrated while it was still Mexico, and I'm given to understand that her paternal family has been in the area at least since it was Spain. The reunion was of a large chunk of the former, and it pulled in people from across Texas and a few points outside the Lone Star State. So far as I know, a good time was had by all--not in the least dampened by the rain that wet the reunion area. (It's the Texas Hill Country; a good rain is always welcome.)

While my wife's family does such things every year--multiple times each year, in fact, with the different branches of the family having them at different times--my own family does not. Funerals and weddings are really the only times we gather en masse; some holidays will see some groups of us meet. But there is no regular meeting, no time that we get together just to do so. And there are reasons for it. When we've tried such things in the past--there're a couple of times I remember--they've not gone terribly well. Too, there are fewer of us than there once were; the birthrate has slowed in the past couple of generations, while it seems death has been coming more quickly.

How I ought to respond to such is unclear to me. The happy reunion of my wife's family proceeds in no small part from decades of doing it; starting such a thing among my family would not have that history behind it. And it would have the aggregate history of the smaller-scale interactions across the family--which interactions have not always been happy. There is this, too: we do better when we are working. Many of the fondest memories I have of my family are of us doing some kind of construction or home improvement project together, putting our combined energies toward making things better, laughing along the way and eating together after. But there are only so many of such things available, and money for materials is not as abundant as could be hoped.

I'm accustomed to the matter, of course. I am not sure how it will affect Ms. 8, however. She is much more an extrovert than her father, which serves her well in many ways, but it means she needs contact with people far more than I. She thrives on it, and I try to give her such things as she thrives on. (It's part of why she's enrolled in the classes she is.) Whether having more such reunions would help her thrive more is unclear to me, though. If they go well, then they would clearly be to her good. But I am not at all sure that they would go well; among others, I am absolutely shit at hiding how I feel about things, and I know my daughter responds to my moods.

The uncertainty about how to proceed annoys me.