Family Ties

I’ve recently re-connected with one of my cousins back home that I grew up with. She is more or less my sister in the sense that we spent all our summers and holidays together in our grandma’s house when we were kids. We were practically raised with the same values, shared the same clothes, fought about stuff that does not make sense – just like real sisters. We were really tight back in the day. With me being away and through some family issues over the past few years, we’ve grown apart. Today, I’m happy about the opportunity to get things back to the way they were. She now has a job with access to the internet and we email each other practically every day. I am starting to feel like she’s back in the part of my life that she occupied a long time ago.

Her brother’s going back home tomorrow and my sisters and I are sending him off with gifts for most everyone. I sent her an email with a list of what she should be getting and who’s sending what just in case he doesn’t remember. As we send each other emails back and forth, I can feel her excitement at the thought of getting new things. I put myself in her shoes and I get excited too. She asked for really simple things that people abroad take for granted. She’s asked for school bags for the kids and activity books that they can occupy their minds with this summer. For
herself, she asked for make up (which I totally forgot to get), perfume and some work-related books. As usual, I sent my favorite cousins some clothes. I heard that one of them repeated a class (Urgh!) so I withheld some things I was going to send her. It’s so annoying! She’s in an expensive school and has a long way to go but obviously doesn’t care about the future. I can’t reward that kind of behavior with clothes when she obviously needs books. I’ve decided to wait until someone goes later in the year and send her stuff then (if she shows improvement in school, of course).

My grandma doesn’t need anything but I always try to send her things that remind me of her. I ended up sending some of her favorite cereals and a huge fluffy yellow towel. She had this huge pink fluffy towel growing up and I couldn’t find one like it so I bought a yellow one instead. When we were kids, she had a somewhat of a breakfast ritual every morning. She would wait until everyone was done with breakfast before settling down to have hers. Maybe she wanted some peace and quiet, who knows? Another thing she did was use ‘fresh’ milk instead of powdered milk. Today, I find myself wondering why she just didn’t use Dano like the rest of us. It’s difficult to talk to my grandmother but I wish I could have conversations
with her and find out more about our family. I also wish I could have some of her recipes. She could throw it down back in the day! I think that’s where I learnt my love of food. Unfortunately for my new family, I could never be as good as her. Her children banned her from cooking a few years ago and hired someone else to cook from her. I’m sure she wasn’t too happy with that!

In one of her emails, my cousin said that her kids went to a relative’s birthday party last weekend and partied like they had been starved of parties. That’s probably because they haven’t been to many parties since the beginning of the year. It’s funny because we would use any excuse to throw ourselves a party even if it was just for us. She also said her kids were surprised that they had other relatives because they only hang out with her sister’s kids. That really made me sad because her kids are growing up without knowing who we are. I hope one day I can go and visit with my kids and then have all the kids spend summers together like we did
back in the day.