Family, Attachment, Time

Family. Whether large or small, family influences our early identity until we can solidify it ourselves as adults.

The five of us children now is our 60’s and 70’s, have children of our own with attachments to mom and dad as we had. In our case, in the U.S.A., I have great-nieces and nephews that I only know by name. Distance prohibits frequent visits but the attachment remains due to the time spent together when parents pass on those family stories of those gone or living far away but remembered by parents.

There is only the five of us who can recall our grandmother and great-grandmother. The attachments continue through our stories and tattered but saved black and white photos.

As time passes and our lives are gone but remembered in their marriages and children, that word “family” continues to live and breathe. What the third generation cannot know is what the five of us lived through and this is difficult to transmit. I can smell my grandmother’s bathroom with its rich scent of soaps. I can duplicate in my mind the placement of her furnishings. I can taste the special sandwich she made 'only' for me even though I found out later that she made that “special sandwich” for each of us.

The five of us vowed to gather every three years since we were not getting younger. (It happened twice over ten years.) My brother lives across the country and the next time we meet, it’ll be as though we talked yesterday. That’s a family attachment regardless of what time gave us or has taken away.

We have only one family - good, bad, indifferent. Those early attachments are connections that can never be erased but surely shared with our family’s next generation.