Ratting on the Relatives

There's a reason people on Facebook have "friends" and not "relatives." My husband's horrible cousins illustrate the underlying principle perfectly: They have recently "un-friended" him because he has publicly disagreed with their narrow political views.  Despite being first cousins--their fathers were brothers--and sharing childhood, attending family picnics and weddings and funerals and Passover seders and anniversary celebrations, and with the added bond of being two sets of identical twins fairly close in age, as adults they decided the relationship was untenable because they are unwavering, unthinking, unflinching Democrats and my husband is an Independent who dares to make a decent living. His tendency to think for himself goes against their blind acceptance of the Democratic manifesto, which is founded on self-righteousness and takes no prisoners.

This twisted twosome is but the tip of the iceberg where our families are concerned. My husband has an older brother who I have never met, despite the fact that we have been married for almost 25 years. His other brother lives in Brooklyn and has not surfaced in several years. (Both are, by the way, his Facebook friends.) My sister may or not be dead, I have no idea and no way to find out. My first cousin, who lives on Nantucket Island, called me every day for five months for a pep-talk/counseling session while she was undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Since her cure I have not heard a peep out of her, and that was four years ago. My aunt, a relative by marriage to my mother's brother, who demanded and accepted my visits and gifts and favors and shoulder to cry on at least once a week for 60 years, dropped me like a hot potato-- I usually avoid cliches but that's exactly what I felt like--the day my uncle died. Never heard from her again, and that was three years ago. My mother, whose father was one of 13 children, had dozens of cousins who were a constant presence during my childhood, yet she died alone in a nursing home where she had languished for more than a year, with nary a visit from anyone but my father, my sister and me. Following her death, several of them called to ask how she was doing. ("Not well," I told them.)

God smiled at me with my wonderful son, who rues the fact that he is an only child with no discernible familial relationships. I tell him he's not missing anything, as long as he has those 715 "friends" on Facebook.