the extended family: who are they now?

Who is my family?

Here I am in love with someone, entirely committed to him as he is to me, and I’m mulling over how that complicates the definition of ‘my family.’

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In what follows, I have changed names (the few that I give) to protect the vulnerable, and I have obscured professions (”performance”), but all the kinship designations are precise and accurate, true to life-outside-the-blog.

I could not have invented this complexity, because I wouldn’t have believed it.

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Of course, there’s my own little nuclear family, my two college-age children and my mother; and there are a couple of aunts and uncles and zillions of cousins — first cousins, second cousins, third cousins, even fourth cousins, as well as first cousins once-removed, first cousins twice-removed, and so on.

Need I say, I don’t see all these people on a daily basis or even a regular one, though many of them are in my email address book, and I’m about to see a bunch of first cousins and their children (my first cousins once-removed, i.e. my children’s second cousins) in two weeks.

And with them will be my uncle (he was once married to my father’s sister, and my mother has been divorced from my father for almost 59 years; and in fact they were divorced before this uncle married my aunt; so he and my mother were never, strictly speaking, in-laws, but they may be considered ex-in-laws, and at any rate they’re fond of one another and keep up because I arrange this annual get-together) AND (remember how this sentence began? if not, look back) my uncle’s third wife, who is not my aunt but whom I’ve met a number of times and like very much.

And then, there’s Performer’s family! Last night I met a member of his family for the first time, his older brother, to whom he’s very close. We met at a performance arranged by — okay, get ready — Performer’s brother’s second wife’s son by her first husband.

Let me try again: Performer and his two brothers have all been married more than once, but the only one you need to think about at the moment is the older brother (P is the youngest). OB (let that stand for older brother) married, as his second wife, a widow with two children, a son and a daughter. Present at last night’s performance were OB and wife, her son, and her grandson by her daughter.

Correction: Let me clarify. OB is not really married to the woman everyone thinks of as his wife, but they had a little ceremony of their own, or a party or something, and they consider themselves married, though “in law” they are not.

Hmmmm. That complicates the non-relationships here even more!

So how am I related to her grandson?

1) not at all
2) not remotely
3) for that matter, how is Performer related to the grandson? he might be said to be a great-uncle, but since his brother isn’t really married to his “wife,” or whatever she is, he really is not a relative of the young man (a very nice-looking young man, a tall skinny teenager in a jacket too large for him) at all.
4) Well, if Performer isn’t related to the grandson, then I’m not either.

But I’m forgetting:

I’m not related to Performer.

He’s still in the middle of a divorce.

So it’s his not-quite-ex-wife, Becky, who is not-quite-related to the tall skinny teenager in the mal-fitting jacket.

And it’s Becky again who is not related to Performer’s brother’s non-wife.

As Performer would say, Oy.

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And come to think of it, how is Performer related to my uncle’s third wife?

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More importantly, how is Performer’s older brother’s almost-wife’s grandson by her late husband related to Performer’s beloved’s (that’s me) uncle’s third wife?

Or (more simply) how is Performer’s older brother’s almost-wife’s son-in-law related to my first cousin Amy’s husband David? and their children?

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If I do this anymore, I may discover that I’m talking about the same people, i.e. how is Z related to Z, in which case Performer and I are related, or may be, in which case we’ve been committing incest.

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Unlikely, though.

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But you see the problem.

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