The Magic of Cousins

At a family wedding this spring, all of my first cousins on my mom’s side were in the same place for the first time in almost 20 years. This wasn’t the first wedding in our family or first occasion to gather, but we all have busy lives and getting us in one room has become logistically challenging as the years have passed. Spending time with my cousins that I knew so well in my childhood, made me think about growing up and away from our families, and in an unexpected twist, my desire to reconnect with my cousins after all this time.

My mom is the middle of three sisters and their children were my first friends. In terms of birth order, I am smack dab in the middle of what I affectionately refer to as the first-marriage-kids and the second-marriage-kids.

My older cousins have only a few years on me, but as a kid those years really mattered. I worshipped them. They were my first choreographers, my first sleepover companions, and my first birthday party guests. They were also my first tormenters.

They were my first glimpse of the cool and older foreign world of perms and neon. They dragged me out of bed to see Princess Diana get married. They introduced me to Duran Duran, Run DMC, and the Beastie Boys. They were my first crushes: the people that mattered most to me as far as what they did, what they thought, and what they said.

We spent every holiday and school vacation together. Later when I had a younger cousin, we would spend our vacations watching The Muppets Take Manhattan and Clue over and over again, rewinding back to the beginning once the VHS tape came to a stop. These were my first movie marathons.

As we got older there were fewer sleepovers and dance routines, but we cheered for each other at sporting events and high school graduations.

One by one, we embarked on our own lives. We didn’t consciously turn away from each other, but time and distance were stronger than the blood that held us together. We’ve always been kind to each other, but we might have been strangers or distant acquaintances, we knew so little of each other’s real lives. And while I knew who they were at ten, I couldn’t tell you much about the adults that they had become.

There was a dormant period, and now the most interesting thing is happening. We are circling back to each other. Partially because, we have our own kids and we want them to know and understand their extended tribe and to know what cousins feel like. But also because we still feel connected from our shared childhoods.

We’re making the effort to not only gather annually, but to really know each other, not just as cousins but as people. We have much more in common than we realized when we were younger, dispersed, and forging our individual paths.

As the three sisters that brought us into this world move through the second half of their lives, the cousins are in a way coming home. We, the cousins, are seeing our family as a gift we can no longer take for granted and that we can no longer put off until later.

We’re cherishing each other and making a new space for the part of cousins in our lives. Or maybe we’re just dusting off the place where they’ve always belonged. Either way, there’s something magical about returning to a place so familiar and yet so new at the same time.