Family Reunion

“Family love is this dynastic awareness of time, this shared belonging to a chain of generations… We collaborate together to root each other in a dimension of time longer than our own lives.”
- Michael Ignatieff

I am blessed to be a part of a very large, very close family. It is full of loudness and ethnicity and food and craziness. Our gatherings are full of the same. Saturday was the most recent of these gatherings: The Family Reunion.

Both my mother and father came from close families. My mother grew up with three brothers, her mother and her grandmother. In addition she had many aunts, uncles and cousins. My mother’s connection with her family is a deep part of who she is. She has passed this value on to my sister and me.

My dad was the fifth son of Italian immigrants. The “boys” for the most part settled down close to home and raised their own families. Nana and GrandPop had a homestead in Queens, with a vegetable garden and a grove of fig trees. We gathered there often.

My childhood was full of get-togethers for Sunday dinners, holidays, Baptisms and Communions. Thanksgiving dinner was always a feast. Every year we traveled on Christmas Eve to Nana Helen’s apartment. Aunt Pat’s house was Christmas Day. Aunt Alice and Uncle Bernie had the bet pets – first Smokey and then Ollie. And there were the cousins. About a dozen on each side. Most were older than my sister and me, but those closest in age became our “sisters” and “brothers.”

As a teenager, I continued to see my extended family often. Some of my first teen angst was felt at the Knights of Columbus hall in College Point. There were weddings all throughout the 80’s. I was asked to be Godmother to my cousins’ babies. And when I went off to college in Albany, my “big brother” Cousin Gerard would be there to “keep an eye on me.” (Turns out the best off-campus parties were at his house!)

At funerals, we joined together to remind each other of the love and connection that would never depart. The family served as solace, support and memoir. I was reminded that I would always be a part of something much larger than just my own daily trials.

Recently, at weddings of the baby cousins I once held, I’ve become philosophical about the role of my family: It puts me in mind of a tree.

There are the roots – my grandparents, their parents and those who came before them.

There are the branches, growing outward and upward each year – my parents, their brothers, my cousins, their children and my own.

But it’s the trunk I’ve thought a great deal about recently. The trunk is the tall, sturdy, mostly unchanging aspect of the tree. Against the trunk I can measure and reflect my own stature. I have been a little girl, a shy adolescent, a responsible teenager who’s “good with babies,” all in the presence of my family. I have been a student, a traveler, a hostess, a bride and a mother – all these things witnessed by my family.

My family has offered me a perspective on myself that I could obtain nowhere else. As daughter, granddaughter, niece, cousin, sister, mother and aunt, my personal experience deepened. I became myself.

Thanks to my large, loving and sometimes overwhelming family, I am Nicole.