Hellchick

01.01.04 :: ringing in the new year
[family]

The new year is here, and now I can expect to keep mistakenly writing 2003 on all my checks. (Thank God I write fewer checks now that most bills can be paid online.)

We had a terrific Christmas. We went up to Washington state and spent about a week with my dad, his girlfriend Molly, and my sister and everyone else in the family and friends circle. Christmas Eve itself was a wild ride — there were about eight kids and thirty or so adults. This year we knew would be a little trying because it's the first Christmas after my brother's death in June. While Leif had never really been one for the holidays and hadn't always been involved when we celebrated, the shadow of his memory still hovered in the background. To compound it, his three baby girls were going to be coming over Christmas Eve with everyone else to celebrate.

Len and I had only met Chawndra (age ~2) and Iahna (age ~3) once before, and that was when Leif, their 22-year-old father, had died in June. We'd met them on less than happy circumstances as they'd come over to the house after the memorial service ended. It was bittersweet, since we were not only seeing them for the first time, but we were meeting the family who was taking care of them for the first time. This family was the aunt and uncle of the girls' mother, my brother's girlfriend.

At the time, we didn't get to meet Maryanne, the baby, who was only a few weeks old then. But the family taking care of her — the other uncle of the girls' mother and his wife — came over with their eight year old daughter and Maryanne on Christmas Eve, along with Chawndra and Iahna and the couple taking care of them and their twin six years olds, a boy and a girl. And we had Molly's granddaughters over (six years old and 1.5 years old) along with tons of friends and family.

As soon as I was introduced to Gary and Nicki, who have Maryanne, she asked if I'd like to hold her, so I did, and she encouraged me hold her for pretty much the rest of the night if I wanted to. That gesture right there took away an awkwardness I felt about meeting them for the first time. And so I took Maryanne over to the tree and sat on the floor with her, and all the kids gathered around to open up their presents.

It was at this point that I sat back and really looked at what was happening. Gary and Nicki's eight year old daughter was happily helping me open the baby's gifts. Bob and Becky's twin kids were opening a gift my dad and Molly had given them. Becky was looking for Chawndra and turned around to see my dad holding her and said, "oh, she's with Grampa," as if it was perfectly natural for her to call him that. Little Molly, Molly's granddaughter, was playing with Iahna. And hanging on the tree was a Christmas ornament that Becky had given my dad that had the names of the four kids on it: my brother's two girls Iahna and Chawndra, and Brandon and Ashleigh, Becky and Bob's twins.

It was an amazing moment that really clarified for me, in that one snapshot, how our families, who hadn't known each other until a few months ago, have gelled and come together after a terrible set of circumstances had affected us all. Somehow we've become one big family and it feels like the way it should be given what's happened. After a rough year for our families, this one moment that seemed like forever as I sat and watched it, made the best end to the year we could have hoped for.