Hatches, Matches and Dispatches

If I asked you to think about your extended family, you’d probably recall seeing most of them at maybe the birth of baby Ben, cousin Billy’s marriage to cousin Sarah…hmm! Or maybe when your old uncle finally kicked the bucket. You see for me this is a very strange part of human behaviour. I can understand not wanting to associate with all of the family on a constant basis but feeling obliged for whatever reason to become easily forgotten and a little poorer for just one day is quite beyond me.

A good example of this is when our first child was born. My mother informed me that auntie Margaret had sent a card and a few pairs of booties. Not wanting to sound ungrateful I asked, “Who the hell is auntie Margaret” to which she replied

“Well she’s not actually your auntie but do you know Bertie next door but one…” She went on to explain that auntie Margaret wasn’t related to us even by marriage, just a crazy old lady who likes to knit.

So I sit with a card from a total stranger in one hand and the booties in the other, which turned out were too small for the ten pound baby I’d managed to squeeze out. I finished opening the rest of the cards from distant relatives I’d never heard of. Sending lots of best wishes and “hope everything goes well” messages made me wonder why nobody cared how things were going for us before the baby.

Similar thing happened when we got married. Only a few close friends and relatives received an invitation from us, space in the registry office was limited and the small reception was being held at my parents. This was our mistake, letting my mother arrange the reception. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful but walking into what was meant to be a personal ceremony only to find that forty per cent of your guests were strangers made the whole thing quite bizarre.

Some of the guests I vaguely remembered from when I was a child, others I’d never even met, but I did find it odd having to be introduced to my own wedding guests. To be honest, I don’t blame them; a five pound pan set or smelly wooden bread bin is a small price to pay when you can drink forty pounds worth of somebody else’s alcohol.

Strangest of all was my Grandad’s funeral. In his later years, he could barely move causing him to gain an enormous amount of weight. In turn, this meant he could no longer drive unless he held his breath, as his large stomach would impede his steering. A few close family members would do occasional chores for him like gardening, shopping and even cleaning the unused car he refused to sell. Once again, they all crawled out of the woodwork for the funeral.

Some of them hadn’t seen him for so long they were shocked at the abnormal width of his coffin. Some of the guests were so distant, that if I had been in charge of sending out the invitations I would have requested a swab for DNA confirmation. The many people who didn’t have the money for petrol to visit or couldn’t possibly get time off work when he was alive, only confirmed to me that where there is a will, they will always find a way.