Families. What balls of secrets so tightly wound we are. Time has a tendency to loosen these secrets, no matter how angry or disgusted they might make you feel.<\/p>\n

It’s about an hour before T-giving dinner and most of my family (cousins, second cousins, aunts, uncles, etc) are congregated on the autumn-hued, idyllic front porch of my uncle’s Bed and Breakfast in Kinmount. In a lull of the conversation, my religious, neo-conservative aunt throws down a photograph on the table. In it, my cousin is smiling, her head touching the head of a young kid.<\/p>\n

“She found him. On Facebook,” She says, matter of fact.<\/p>\n

“Oh?” I say, taking up the picture. Not getting it. Both are smiling ear to ear. Are they in love?<\/p>\n

“She searched him and found him, sent him a message and he replied back saying he had known of her for some time but didn’t know how to start talking to her.”<\/p>\n

I’m even more confused. Was this her new husband? The kid looks half her age. I didn’t recall any break up email or super-poke from her on Facebook letting me know that she was newly single. I’m piecing together a puzzle with boxing gloves on.<\/p>\n

My other cousin from a different aunt says, “No! That’s amazing!” and takes the picture from me.<\/p>\n

“Muh. Yes. Wow!” I say, utterly faking the moment. After the aunt making blithe comments about these two meeting up, the photo goes back into her purse. Pause. The conversation shifts. <\/p>\n

Later, much, I approach Dad with this odd exchange. Apparently this cousin had a child in her teens (un-wed) and gave him up for adoption and had recently reunited with him via the internet. There’s way more to the story that I will not recount for respect out of all those involved but when I got all the “details” it was similar to sitting through a soap opera recount episode while someone punched at my liberal sensitivities. I had heard nothing of this, having been living in England around the time it happened. <\/p>\n

And now I understand<\/em> my neo-conservative wing of my family better. Approve? No. Just understand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Families. What balls of secrets so tightly wound we are. Time has a tendency to loosen these secrets, no matter how angry or disgusted they might make you feel. It’s about an hour before T-giving dinner and most of my family (cousins, second cousins, aunts, uncles, etc) are congregated on the autumn-hued, idyllic front porch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":430,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1192,1185,1190,1193,1189,1182,1188,1194,1177,1181,1180,199,1184,1187,1183,1191,980,1178,1179,1186],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9WjY-Go","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/430"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}