insert witty title here

Thank you for all the great comments yesterday! I really wasn't fishing for an "attaboy" - but it's appreciated nonetheless :)


It turns out that I have a whole collection of paternal relatives in Houston, Texas. I knew that I had a first cousin down there somewhere, but I haven't had contact with her for many, many years.

Two months ago one of her sons tracked me down and wrote to me, and we've been corrosponding since. He's planning a trip up to Canada next summer to visit his grandmother (my father's sister) in Ontario and would like to add a visit to British Columbia to meet me as well.

I've always had very little contact with my father's side of the family - which seems to be the usual case in a marriage: one side of a family becomes predominant and the other side slips into semi-obscurity.

My father was never close to his two sisters or his own father (his mother died when he was still a toddler) and so I simply never got to know them. Once I was an adult, I was fortunate to establish my own connection with my paternal grandfather and my own boys even got to meet him in 1998, a year before he too died.

Now that my ex (ex1, not ex2) has remarried, I worry that my kids will lose that sense of connection to their own blood relatives...particularly since ex1's parents are both dead, my father is AWOL and my mother is growing cacti in Mexico. Ex1's new husband has one of those boisterous in-your-face families that require lots of clan gatherings and visits, so those are the only "relatives" that my kids are routinely being exposed to.

I'm hoping that as they get older, they'll want to find those connections and roots again...and when they do, I'll be waiting to help them out.



.