A Tribute to Cousins
READ BY THE AUTHOR!!
My mother was the baby of the small family she was born into. I was the youngest of the small family she and my father created. When I met my husband and the large clan his grandfather with the sweet smile had managed, I was excited, envisioning all the family reunions to come.
In Israel, a world as far away as it was mythical in my mind, there was a whole tribe of people who smiled at us, joked with us through a few languages, and spoke a primordial shorthand that gets passed through the generations. As a story keeper I wanted to know all of them, set down the tree and come up with someplace where an outsider like me could belong.
One branch of my mother-in-law’s family showed up at our wedding. An uncle and well loved aunt and their two small girls, one in a blue velvet dress, the other with large green eyes and a radiant smile. They stole the show with their contagious youth and endless dancing, so much so that twenty-five years later my family of old farts remembers them. The ones still with us anyway.
As young marrieds in one of our first Gregorian New Year’s together, we wound up visiting family, cousins our age who took us down to the Haifa port to hear the midnight blare of ships ushering in 1996—one of the few nods to an otherwise ignored secular New Year in the holy land.
On our next trip, feeling my way into an adult reality that was holding to its pair of six-year-olds playing doctor feel, this same cousin told me she was pregnant on a cat filled beach of a wild Mediterranean Sea. Jealousy churned in my empty womb before I could stop it. The monthly failing at pregnancy was chiseling a whole new emptiness inside me. Ignited with envy, I was overjoyed for her all the same. Her sarcasm drenched husband joked with my sweet one, and we listened to the waves, most of our lives left to be written.
Some fertility god, and a very competent specialist smiled on us eventually and our oldest son was born less than two years younger than theirs.
Another of the clan, a striking redhead who is one of the few women I know, who believed they could have it all and took it—moved to New York shortly after my father died and my son was born. With her spectacular older daughter and wry, outrageous husband we were fast friends and I was happily cajoled into plans even when my husband wasn’t such an easy sell, preferring to avoid the self imposed pressure to be something other than who he is—easy to love. It took a long time to convince him, his family was already sold.
The birth of our second babies catapulted us into family legend, when she went into labor the day of my son’s Brit Mila (a sort of circumcision party where the child gets drunk, penis snipped and everyone eats in celebration--all at the dining room table). That oldest daughter and her grandmother came to celebrate with us. And we embarrass the children with the retelling this story anytime we can. Maybe that’s just me.
I was devastated when they moved back to Israel to be closer to family, but how could I blame her? My husband and I enjoyed a moment we thought we might join them, but by then the kids were getting older and my mother was showing early signs of the dementia that would take her a few years later.
Still, there are always a few more cousins in the hopper and making their presence known, either as travel companions or neighbors. Some came with us on a memorable trip up the east coast where we ate our way through Denny’s while we watched the trees ignite with fall colors. The youngest sister’s easy understanding and gentle curiosity makes everyone fall in love with her, despite the fact that she doesn’t stay in touch easily--a trait we share, that only hurts ourselves.
The man cousin from this vaunted line came to live in New York with his charming, knowledgeable wife. Before they had children they adopted my husband and me despite our many years difference. Friday nights they cooked dinner for us, provided easy and less adult ears for our boys, and offered endless distraction--some of it unreasonable--until Sunday. When life moved us to different cities, their loss created a hole we are still trying to fill.
Every family is different, I know. I am often negligent with my own, never knowing the difference between calling too often and never at all. Don’t get me wrong. This extended family has its own line of dysfunction, only I get to look the other way because it’s not that close. They’re only cousins after all.
Some of whom we are more grateful to than they’ll ever know. We come in and out, always happy to see each other, always ready to take on the new crop as they pop like hot corn into their lives. There are some of the most valuable and long term relationships I have.
Last week we got to return the favor and go to the wedding of that young girl with the blue velvet dress. She made for a stunning bride, and I got to play on a playground with her tiny niece afterward, a wedding I can look forward to in my old age as the generations roll by. This new one includes engineers and artists, smooth talkers and athletes. They are bound to be swept up into the winds of life, as we were.
In any family, let alone a Jewish one, extension of every kind is far from given, cut off as we have been through many wars. When my mother spoke of her cousins, even the ones I never met, her smile was widest. If you’re lucky cousins hit you like that. Our nieces and nephew acted as extra siblings to my boys, and the loss of our precious Maya altered the dynamic of the entire family. Irrevocably.
Extended family shines like this in a string of small, miniature moments like precious beads on a chain stretching from one generation into the next. This Jewish New Year at a table overflowing with sweetness on the side of Mount Carmel, in a home out of something in a magazine, from the updated gefilte fish into spicy fish balls by the eldest of her generation, to the classic salads and honey cakes, apples and ever present abundance, I am thrilled and relieved to have landed here. I watched the shake of my husband’s head as he laughed and felt like one of the guys, while I hopped from one cousin unit to the next, buzzing, drinking strong coffee and sharing so much love. I am infinitely grateful to have stumbled into this hive. I hope you are, into yours.