Yes, good looks run in the family.
As I mentioned on my previous post, I recently took a trip to El Paso, Texas to visit my cousin, A. At the time, my biggest worry was trying to figure out if I should wear or not a certain black dress during my trip, once I was there, I realized how pointless my worry about it had been (but for those of you who care, I did end up wearing it). While it was a short trip, It has been probably one of my favorites in my short almost-26 years of life. Two days in the middle of the dessert with my older, wiser cousin A, her husband J and my younger, carefree cousin F taught me more about family and acceptance (of both, others and myself) than any other extended family bonding time Ive had before.
We spent our time driving around the Texan freeway, spilling our hearts out, asking each other for advice of things as simple as what shoes to get a boyfriend back home, or as complicated on how to properly raise kids. We also spent a lot of time drinking, honestly, if there was ever a prize for red wine consumption, wed take gold, silver and bronze. It was precisely during one of those day-drinking moments, when we were all talking about how crazy our family is, and how we each have lived (and survived) through the scrutiny of our very conservative and religious relatives that I realized something that changed the way I feel about our loud family.
We could all write a whole book, maybe even a whole saga, of pages filled with how fucked up our families are. I mean it, there arent enough pages in a notebook to tell all the stories of how our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles have traumatized us or made us feel less than worthy. At the same time, we could all write ten more books about how blessed we are, about how much our families have done for us, wether we realized it at the time or not. We could write endless about the crazy, but for every bad story, we could write an epic novel about the good times. And no, I dont just mean my family. Pretty much everyone has this same experience. All families have bad, but also, all families have good in them.
It took a little rosé and some pool time for the there of us, the family rebels: the drunk, the fat and the gay, to figure out that no matter how far we are from we are, and no matter how bad we screw up, we will always have each other. It took a few couple bottles of red wine, for me to realize that its easier to try to understand the other persons situation, rather than to judge and hold on to old grudges (I told you, were good with alcohol here).
Xo,
C.