I can’t believe I’m related to my brother, who is a neoconservative Limbaugh-worshipper who reveres GW Bush as some sort of moral hero and who may be a latent Tea-Partyer, though he hasn’t actually said it. His wife and daughter are the same.
Our folks were lifelong Dems. Go figure.
I can’t believe I’m related to my cousin C, who thinks a man isn’t worth marrying unless he makes a boatload of money and who thinks I live in a bad neighborhood with gangbangers and nightly drive-bys… apparently because we don’t have a lot of two-story, 5 BR, 2.5 bath, 3-car-garage/ swimming pool homes (which is what she’s used to) in my neck of the woods.
Oh, it doesn’t have to be negative. Just name some relatives with whom you have little or nothing in common.
Back in the '60s I was among groups of students racially integrating segregated public places. My family completely disowned and disavowed any relation to me. I had no contact with any of them in about a half century. According to SSDI all whom I knew are now dead.
I had an ancient understanding of this phenomenon. Thanksgiving of 1972, my uncle was gloating to me about my boy McGovern just getting his ass whipped by Tricky Dick, and I muttered something about history’s judgment on Nixon (which was was pretty damned harsh and pretty damned quick, as it turned out) and looked to see if all my cousins seated around the table were going to give me a rousing cheer of support and–solid glares. Of the people in my family, all of them of voting age had cast their ballots for Nixon and everyone was glowering at me. I realized I was born to a family of wolves. And pretty dumb wolves, at that.
My dad and my brother are outgoing, high-energy extroverts. My dad used to do local politics and he’ll never turn down a chance to have a chat with someone at the grocery store. He knows everyone! And my brother does advertising sales - he’s always talking to someone and he would never shut up and enjoy some silence until he had a baby that needed sleep.
Meanwhile, Mom and I are introverts who prefer to just sit at home with a good book.
Both brothers right-wing Republicans; one thinks Palin would make an excellent President.
Both of them married and divorced; one three times, the other eight times.
One of my brothers hasn’t spoken with me in five years (no loss for me) - although my older brother and I have regular contact and are actually quite close; we just don’t discuss politics.
As a life-long, screaming liberal Democrat, and Gay, and together with my SO/partner for over 30 years, I sometimes wonder how all three of us could have all been raised by the same parents, in the same house, for all those years.
I’m a dyed in the wool tory (republican) free market capitalist whilst my slightly older brother is a sandal wearing, yoghurt knitting, lentil eating bleeding heart liberal.
Our occasional discussions on politics tend to be quite entertaining…
My younger brother and his wife are bible-bangers and go to bible study twice a week. He actually used to be fun but I don’t have clue what happened to send them down this path.
As often as one hears about religious parents casting out their children when they question their faith, my mother kind of had it the opposite way. Her parents raised her in an atheistic, God-does-not-exist household, and my mother found religion when she met my father. Apparently, this severed what relationship my maternal grandmother still had with her. I have never met her as a result.
She is my only living gradparent, and it would be nice to have that connection. But from what I have been told from a number of sources I trust, she is a vindictive, borderline-personality, atheistic, die-hard liberal with an intense hatred for religion, which happens to be a huge part of my life and my family. I only recently learned to let go of the fact that in the 20 years I have been on this earth, not once has my grandmother seen fit to acknowledge my existence. Not even with a happy birthday card. That I am related to such a person is something that continues to confound and befuddle me.
Of course, the whole reason my maternal grandparents went atheist in the first place was because their differing churches cast them out for getting married. Go figure.
I can tell you that other people can’t believe that I’m related to my older sister, who’s half Japanese. I think the confusion arises from our mom having four kids with three husbands (the first was Japanese, hence…), and her ignoring the word “half” as it applies to siblings.
My sister an I are very, very different people. I’m a pale, overweight, urban, nerdy couch potato; she’s an outdoorsy, resolute woman-of-action who looks like Lara Croft with a better tan. She’s backpacked from Tierra Del Fuego to Costa Rica, crossed the Atlantic in a racing yacht, rescued Indian villages after the Boxing Day Tsunami, and scuba dived in the Great Barrier Reef. When I travel abroad, I look for the museums; she tries to find the most remote, inaccessible hiking trails and conquer them all.
I love her dearly, but she clearly lives in a different, more awesome world than I do.
My same-age cousin has lived in the same house her whole life. She’s a Catalanist of the worst kind, the best way I know to shut her up when she starts on a xenophobic speech is to point out that three of her grandparents were “immigrants” (from other parts of Spain, yes she’s that xenophobic) and the fourth was half-Italian. She dropped out of high school after retaking 12th grade twice, worked in admin support positions for almost 20 years before getting her GRE and a Law degree (in Spain that’s a Bachelor’s) via long-distance education.
I’ve had over 20 different addresses; if you go by the Spanish government’s definitions (“spend 30 days or more in a row in that country”), I’ve lived in half a dozen countries on two continents. I’m a Chemical Engineer, with a Master’s in Theoretical Chemistry and a Postgraduate Diploma in Translation. I prepare for a move in less time than she prepares for a weekend out of town. Politically, I’m a regionalist but also a unionist, both in the Spanish and European levels, and my notion of Utopia includes people being able to stay where they live if that’s what they want and to move if that’s what they want (so long as they haven’t done something which gets that right taken away as punishment).
She was much more of a target for the Grandparents from Hell than I was, but she’s part of the group of relatives which, depending on the phase of the moon, either denies that anything happened or poo-poohs any specific claims with “but that isn’t so bad!” Apparently, so long as no dicks get shoved into any orifices, “it isn’t so bad”. I’m… very much not part of that group.
Of five siblings, I’m the only one who really left home. Not that the other 4 still live with my mom, but they all live an hour or less from where we grew up, and one sister is 6 miles from Mom.
I joined the Navy when I was 19 and have lived in 8 different states, more than once in multiple cities or multiple times in some states, as well as 2 foreign countries. I know that doesn’t make me a globe-trotter, but contrast that with the sister who hates going away for a weekend, let alone a vacation. The other sibs have traveled, but they never had any desire to live anywhere other than near where we started. I just don’t get it.
My mother is so pro-Israel that she’s a bigoted asshole. Last week, we had a conversation where she referred to I’m-a-Dinner-Jacket’s speech at Columbia University a few years ago. She said that it was the perfect opportunity to “start a conversation about Israel and Iran” and that the one guy’s question about gays in Iran was stupid and meaningless. I pointed out that the conversation about Israel and Iran has been going on for quite a while, that the question about homosexuality was a good one, and that not everything has to be (or should be) about Israel. She had to go right after that.
She thinks I’m not a very good Jew. Gee, I wonder why. :rolleyes:
My parents are both Republicans. I think they moved so that my sister and I wouldn’t have to go to school with black kids. My sister and I, their only children, are both liberal Democrats. We handle it by not discussing politics or race around them, and I make sure not to wear my Obama T-shirts when they’re going to be around.
They’re active in their Methodist church. I stopped going to church when I went away to college, and eventually converted to Judaism. My sister is “spiritual but not religious”, is married to a Catholic, and is raising her kids Catholic.
The only country my parents have been to outside the US is Canada. Mr. Neville and I go to another country most years (he often has conferences in Europe, and we tack a vacation onto it), and my sister spent a summer in Costa Rica.
