Weddingbee Blog

I apologize that this post is NOT about the TV show Family Ties.

I’ve mentioned before that my family is fairly drama-free. Well, that’s not the whole truth. The family members who are still in my life are drama-free. But there is a whole slew of family members to whom I haven’t spoken since I was 19.

A little background: my parents divorced when I was five years old and my sister was an infant. My father remarried when I was eleven and my sister was six. Our new stepmother had a three year-old son from an ex-boyfriend, and we adored both her and our new stepbrother. A few years after that, they had another baby, our half brother.

And then there was our father’s family. His mother, our grandmother, became a widow when my father’s real dad died when my dad and his siblings were still very young. She remarried the man who my dad would soon consider his father, and who I always knew as my grandfather. My dad also had a younger brother and sister, who grew up, met their spouses, got married and had kids.

Now, when I was little, I loved going to see my dad’s family. They spoiled me rotten and fawned all over me like I hung the moon. What small child wouldn’t eat that up with a spoon? But as I grew into an adolescent and teenager, I realized that they weren’t as great as I’d thought they were. They hated my mother after the divorce and said horrible things about her in front of us. And as I grew older, I realized other things that I wasn’t crazy about, not the least of which was their blatant racism. Yikes.

My father died of a heart attack when I was 18 and my sister was 13. A year after that, my sister, stepmother and I were verbally ambushed by our grandmother and aunt over something incredibly ridiculous. On Christmas Day. The three of us defended ourselves and it turned into a pretty ugly screaming match.

That was the last time we ever saw those people. It was sixteen years ago.

Now, I’m going to say something that might make me sound like a terrible person: I don’t regret this. I don’t regret the fact that I haven’t spoken to half of my family in almost half of my life.

Well, that’s not entirely true. It took me years to stop feeling hurt and rejected. And I felt bad about never seeing my little cousins again, since they’d had nothing to do with the drama. And I don’t like knowing how devastated my father would be if he’d known that his widow and children had been completely ostracized by the rest of his family.

A couple of years ago, while helping a friend do her family tree on Ancestry.com, I got curious and looked up my grandparents. Unfortunately, they had both passed on fairly recently. I felt sad, but it was the same kind of sadness I’d have felt if I’d just heard about the deaths of an acquaintance’s grandparents whom I’d never met. It was general sadness because death was sad.

But do I miss that side of the family? No. Did I feel the need to reconnect with them because I’m getting married? No.

And that’s really why I’m writing this post. A huge event like a wedding often brings out the sentimentality in people, the forgiveness in people. But I’m not the most sentimental person out there. As far as forgiveness, well, I haven’t really forgiven anyone. On the other hand, I don’t even care enough to be angry or hurt anymore. I don’t care enough to hate them, or to wish them harm or ill will. I generally hope that they are all healthy and happy, just like I’d hope that anyone on the planet was healthy and happy.

But I don’t care enough about them to open up a whole can of worms by seeking them out and inviting them to this wedding. Even if they would happily accept the invitation (which is very unlikely) I wouldn’t be able to relax if they attended. The wedding would become stressful, and that’s the last thing I want.

Do you have a strained or even estranged relationship with any of your relatives? Is your upcoming wedding causing you to reconsider your family ties and reconnect with any of them?