Brothers and Sisters

For the past couple of days, I've been thinking about my brothers, sister, brother-in-law and sisters-in-law. What a wonderful time in our lives - we are passing on the torch for a new generation! We wake up now with aches in our backs, worries on our minds, and sometimes dark thoughts in our souls, and fail to realize that we are the new "Uncle Jim", the new "Aunt Carolyn", the new generation for our nieces and nephews to reflect upon when they hit our age. And we've done well. We've done really well! Keeping the family together, breaking windows and doors and toys, but keeping it all together in the process. Spending Easter at Mom and Dad's amidst all my playful nieces and nephews made me so proud - so proud to be the Aunt of these wonderful children! So proud to be the sister of such wonderful siblings. We've emerged from in-law vs. blood into a sometimes-cranky-sometimes-frustrated-always-ready-for-a-laugh-or-food-or-drinks-rolling-our-eyes-at-the-absurdity-of-certain-situations kind of family! How perfectly imperfect we really are, and I am writing because I appreciate it so much.

Yes, I am the little sister with some apparently skewed choices, but the choices I made were something we all had to get through. And we are all getting through this together - all of our judgments were skewed, in a way. I realized that this weekend - we loved and got burned. The little sister is going through a divorce! But it's just one more thing to teach the nieces and nephews, one more thing to get through together. Hell, we made it through Jake's surgery and through Corinne beating breast cancer, this is nothin'!

As the years pass us by, more quickly now than ever, I want to hold on to our youth, but at the same time revel in the gifts we have to pass on. Think, for one moment, think of the day Andrea was born; the day we all met Adam for the first time, and how we've grown since then! We are a family, a wonderful, perfectly imperfect family, and there isn't another family out there like us, although the Switala's are pretty kick-ass too! The Fuzzy's living on Shirley Road, ducking the flying plates of pasta, the mash potato food fights, the laughter, the laughter, the laughter...

May God Bless all of us - we are still young, still the same kids inside, reflecting it off ourselves and onto our nieces and nephews... pride, vitality, humor, wit and the occasional sophomoric slur.