April 19, 2010

Family Holiday (column 1)

Posted in Blogs about me at 8:19 pm by diane

I just spent Easter with my family. A family of 28 immediate members most of whom live in the same sub-division of New Territory in Ft. Bend, County. It was crazy, it was loud, it was organized chaos. I love it I hate it, I’m still getting used to it.

 I have two grandparents, six uncles and aunts (three pairs), mom, dad and step-mom, and in my generation, including me, there are 14 of us. We range from 28 years to the most recent addition who is five months and I am the third oldest and the first of only three girls.

All this is still very new to me, after all, I have only been part of this family for four years. See, this is my birth-family. I was adopted when I was eight days old because my birth-parents were 18 and not married when they had me.

My adopted mom and I located my birth-family fours years ago while we were living in Nacogdoches, Texas. We spent the next year driving back and forth to Sugar Land to visit and get-to-know the family.

The family is very cohesive in every sense of the word. In fact they all ive in the same sub-division, except for my birth-father who is considered the renegade for living five minutes away.

My mom and I decided to move down here to be closer so I could establish a relationship. This move was made tremendously easier when we learned that my uncle was a realtor. He not only helped us with our house,which turned out to be in the neighborhood with the rest of the family, but he had also been the realtor for everyone in the family.

My birth-parents did eventually get married and I have four younger siblings, 23 year-old Travis, 19 year-old Trevor, and 13 year-old twins Hunter and Heather. I fit right in with the older boys, probably because they have always known about me. The twins took a little more time.

The twins were five when they first learned about me and from what I have been told, Heather wasn’t too happy about it. She was no longer the only “daddy’s little girl” in the family. Even though it was still a few years before I actually met her, it still took a lot of sister time with her for her to realize that I was not going to take her place as “daddy’s little girl”, I had my own dad. We are just like sisters now.

Hunter took a while to warm up to me too, but I think his issue wasn’t really with me, but more of a shy thing towards girls. He has grown up in a family with only one sister and one other female cousin. Everyone else in the family was male. He wasn’t sure how to respond to an older girl who was old enough to be an authority figure but at the same time a sister. It took a few years but he got the hang of it.

The two older boys didn’t miss a beat. They took me in and had no problems being themselves in front of me, sometimes a little too comfortable, but boys will be boys I guess.

It is still amazes me too look up and look around the room and see a room full of people who look like me. I look so much like my dad that strangers even say it.

The first weekend I met my dad he took me out for ice cream where my brother Trevor worked and a stranger came up to us and said, “Wow, you can tell she’s yours.” It took us all by surprise that he and I both looked up and said, “What?” to which he replied, “You can definitely tell she belongs to you.”

We all smiled and laughed and he hugged me tightly and said, “Yup she is.” Then walked over to my brother and said, “He’s mine too.” The stranger looked and said, “Nope, nuh-uh, he must look like mama, cuz she is the spittin’ image of you.”

I can’t ever go to a family function without someone commenting on how much I look like me dad or my sister or even my middle brother Trevor. Even at this Easter lunch, after four years, the comment was made. My 16 year-old cousin Erica, my little sister and myself were all sitting next to each other on the couch when Erica’s mom came over and commented how much alike all three of us looked to which I later found out had been the topic of quite a few of the day’s conversations.

I’m happy that I am no longer everyone’s focus at family functions and they have given me my personal space not always bombarding me with personal questions. I feel like it has been four years already so they should be used to seeing me, but then I think about how much I am still amazed after four years at seeing people who look and act the way I do.

So I guess even though holidays have forever changed for me it has been a good change. As far as fitting in, I fit right in where I belong with my dad and my siblings and they are the only ones who truly matter.

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