The Family

I found this picture this morning while I was thinking of the telephone calls I had last night dealing with family matters.  Life and people change along the way.  And we cope, ignore, embrace or die trying.  Each of us makes our own decisions. 
And we are stuck with the decisions, bad or good.   I often think about Jim Cooper and me and how we dealt with family matters so differently.  I am so happy that I had so much time at the end of his life to talk about these things and wish that both of us had been mature or had the time to deal with these matters before we got old.  It was not too late.  And it gave both of us some fun and laughter and not a great deal of introspection.  We knew things about our nuclear family that no one else knew--not anything sinister or blindsiding--just the way we lived when it was only Daddy, Momma, Jim, Rosie and me.  Five of us.  Others came in for a visit but we never considered them a real part of our family because they did not live there.  Velna came home with Susan, Autry come home when he was bad but they were only there for a season.   I will never forget Jim standing before me when I mentioned this to him and he said, "You are exactly right.  It was just us!  I never even thought about that!"

Now the nucleus --Mama and Daddy--are gone and nothing will ever be the same.  And that is a normal thing.   The rest of us  have our own families.   In my case, I share Jennie's family (Annie and her children) also and they are in and out, bringing me a coke, putting up my Christmas lights, etc.   and laughing and talking.   I wish that my extended family would be more in keeping with my visions of what Mama Cooper would have wanted but that seemed to die with her death.  Maybe that is normal too;  maybe we had way too much "togetherness" over the years and just didn't realize it!

So, I will press on reaching out to those who reach out to me and replacing the ones who are lost to me with people who have become my family along the way.  Merry Christmas to what used to be a Cooper Family and to all of my "adopted" family:  Bev, Debbie, Joan, Susan, Evelyn, John, Bill, on and on.