There is an episode of “Angel” where our favorite vampire envisions the people he loves around a table sharing love and heaping plates of food. Of course, he is actually in a welded-shut container at the bottom of the ocean and the vision quickly dissolves into a terrifying spectacle where Angel can’t make anyone hear him, but, for a moment, he had just what I’ve always wanted--a peaceful family dynamic. Scarlett was born into a combination of extended family issues. We’ve got a truckload of marriages, steps, halves, and exes with all kinds of mixed-up connections to each other. Nowhere is this more evident than in our cousinhood. Nick has never met his paternal cousins and didn’t get a maternal cousin until two months ago. The paternal cousins that are my age moved away when we were preschoolers and, since they were raised as Tennessee folk rather than California kids, it seems we are more foreign than familiar now. My other two cousins were born when I was in high school and although I dearly love them both, they are in a different generation altoge
ther, which made the cousins-as-friends relationship impractical. I’d like for my kids to have the kind of life where their cousins live nearby and are part of their daily lives, but it doesn’t seem to be in their familial stars either. In Gina and Mercer Mayer’s Just Me And My Cousin, Little Critter only enjoys parts of his family visit. Maybe closeness has its downside, too.http://www.google.com/search?um=1&hl=en&gbv=2&q=just%20me%20and%20my%20cousin&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=iw
http://www.harpercollins.com/authors/17622/Mercer_Mayer/index.aspx
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