I was born in the U.K: Scotland to be specific. My Dad took us to Northern Ireland when I was 3, and Canada when I was 6. Maybe a decade later my Dad’s youngest sister and her family moved to Ontario, and we used to see them sporadically, but almost never anymore.
Apart from that, and as an adult, I have no contact with anyone but my immediate family. (I have a sister nearby, a brother and my Mum 800 Kms away, and another brother 1,200kms away). I see family reunions in parks where it looks like 400 people attend. I don’t even have that many relatives world-wide!
Anyone else in this same situation? Is it an issue psychologically? Has it ever been an issue?
I think I’m coping well, but not having ANY family around sure seems like it’s affecting my kids (8 and 10) because they hear stories of wonderful family get-togethers and the like. We spend every holiday together, yet alone, as a family. It’s sad, yet understandable given my parents’ emigration.
My mom is a foster child and my dad is not close to a lot of his family so I have a family of about two dozen people, all told, and many of them are kids that have been born since I have. I don’t really mind it honestly and actually kind of like it as someone who is not very sociable. My sister, niece, and nephew were actually up yesterday to celebrate a belated birthday for me and my stepdad and I spent 95% of the time away from everyone else in my room, which is where I spend the majority of any family gathering that takes place at my home.
It’d be nice to have more people to count on and maybe be friends with but considering I love but am otherwise not very much like or close to the rest of my family, I doubt it’d make much difference to me if our numbers doubled or even increased. I’d just spend more time in my room.
As a child, the concept of family gatherings fascinated me - my immediate family was living in the US while the rest of our family was in Korea. Having grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles was a childhood fantasy of mine. Then we moved to Korea when I was 13 and I found that my dad’s side of the family was extremely conservative and family gatherings meant being bored out of my mind as a child (my cousins were either stupid, pretentious, or boring) and slaving away in the kitchen as an adult. I did adore my mother’s side of the family, though - my cousins and I got along wonderfully and my aunt and uncle were exactly the aunt and uncle I’d imagined them to be.
Now we’re even more scattered than we were before - my brother, one of my cousins, and I are all living in the US, while the rest of our family is still in Korea, only my aunt and her husband have moved 4 hours south of Seoul while their daughter boards with my parents. God only knows when we’ll ever have a reunion. The only time I really mind is during holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, when all my friends go back home and I’m left alone in Chicago. :: sniffle ::
It’s all relative, really (pardon the pun). I could have done without ever having met my dad’s side of the family but I love to death my maternal kin and am truly sad that my children (if I ever have any) and my cousins’ children will probably grow up barely knowing each other.
My mother’s family is incredibly fragmented. They all live in various parts of the states and can’t stand to be around. I have an uncle in Richmond who I’ve met once in my life. Growing up here, we didn’t get together with family but rather with friends. My mom is fairly introverted although my dad is extremely gregarious. My folks had a pretty large circle of friends who would get together for events.
My father’s family is large. Dad is one of 11 and I have around 30 first cousins. My grandfather has four siblings, two of whom had approximately ten children on average. My grandparent’s fiftieth anniversary was mostly a family event with approximately two hundred and fifty people. I spent a few summers at my grandparents house and it was interesting. My dad is the only one who had any real interest in traveling and emigrating. None of the others moved out of the Brazilian state they live in although most of them moved to the capital city. They tend to be in each others business and while having the company can be nice, it seems like there is always someone who knows your business.
My parents moved to Brazil ten years ago to work and later retire. The only family per se that I have is my mom’s family and they don’t really count since I wouldn’t recognize them if I saw them on the street. I do have good friends so when my wife and I have kids, we’ll probably socialize with them and maybe have them over for gatherings.
My family is extremely split up, but not because of any interpersonal conflicts; we just seem to all have the ‘explorer/xenophile’ gene. As a result, my closest relatives growing up were over a thousand miles away and both sets of grandparents were were each 3000 miles away in opposite directions. To spread our family out any further, I think my son is going to have to be a researcher in Antarctica.
Anyway, I guess it had an effect on me growing up (in that I felt that packing up and setting out far away was the natural thing people did), and the idea of having lots of extended family close by always seemed pretty foreign.
It’s a lot easier now that there’s email, internet phones, webcams, flickr and youtube, but we still want to have some real face-to-face time. At least once a year now, we either pack up and go to America for a week or two, or my parents fly out here. It’s expensive, time-consuming and short, but it’s pretty much what we’ve always done.
One thing that does concern me is that my wife and I are both only children, so the issue of what will happen to our parents when they can no longer care for themselves is one we’ve been studiously avoiding.
My father was from California, my mother from Arkansas. I ended up being raised in West Texas, where there were NO relatives whatsoever. The result is that today, there is not a single one of my many cousins I would recognize if he or she walked up to me on the street today. There are a handful of extremely elderly aunts and uncles stateside that I send a Christmas card each year to, but I’ve never been in close contact with any of their children. Once they all die (and they often forget to tell me when one dies), I’ll have lost touch completely. In effect, I have no family in the US. I guess I missed out on a lot of group family stuff as a result. This probably made it very easy for me to leave the country and live over here.
My immediate family - mom and sister live in Portland OR, brother lives about 2 hours away from me by car in the UK with his wife and daughter. I have grandma + aunt + uncle + 2 cousins in MT, aunt + uncle + 1 cousin in WY, aunt + uncle in NC, cousins (singly) in FL, PA, and NY. All on my mom’s side. I see my family in MT about every other year; I was just back in Aug last year. I see my mom about once a year, either with her flying over here or me flying over there. I’ve also got some family friends who are nearly family in E. WA and MT, as well as a few in CO, who I generally try to see when I’m back in MT.
We’re pretty ostracised from my dad’s family since he died (10 years ago); we were only close to 1 of his brothers and he kinda went downhill fast after dad died, and his other siblings have scattered to the four winds or died and both his parents are dead. I’ve seen 2 of my cousins from his side of the family once since dad died, and never since then.
It feels a bit lonely sometimes. Email and phone keeps me in touch, and it just makes me feel that much more excited to go home when I can. I wish I could get in touch with my dad’s brother but he (or more accurately his wife) feels intimidated by my mom and apparently was worried that my mom will steal her man (my dad’s brother) because she was originally married to another uncle on my dad’s side (yes - we could be on an episode of Jerry Springer if we wanted to, except nobody lives in trailers). Hence the rift.
But to be honest, I am usually so busy living my own life that I can’t spend much time worrying about missing my family.
I’m in the Chicago suburbs, my dad is in my hometown (150 miles away), my mom and sister are in Oklahoma, one of my brothers is in Texas, and one is in Florida. It can get tough for me sometimes, particularly because I’m not much of a phone kinda guy. But pretty much I just try to take the opportunity to see any of them whenever I can as there’s not a whole lot else I can do.
I’ve considered relocating to be near one of my brothers at some point just so I have some local family to spend some time with, but at this point it’s never happened. Maybe someday.
My husband and I have children on both coasts: Queen Bruin is in SoCal, and his youngest daughter is in Walla Walla. His oldest daughter is in Florida. For a while, my oldest was in upstate NY, but now resides in the same town as me.
Email works the best for QB, phone calls seem to work out for his girls. We’re going to see QB graduate in June, so we’re going to California from Colorado via Washington state. Fortunately, we will be driving through some great scenery for most of it. And it’s a good thing my husband and I were both raised in California car culture. We like to drive.
It is normal for me. I am an only child living in Indonesia while my parents live in Mexico; my dad is an only child and my mother was the youngest of 5 in a not-very-close family, so her sibs are all dead or distant. I’m not even sure how many cousins I have and couldn’t begin to name them.
To me that’s normal.
My husband is from a large and fairly happy family that has mostly remained in the midwest, yet he feels that it would be emotionally stifling to live too close by himself.
