This blog will change your life (Part 2)

Family is very important to me (actually I should probably scrap that comment because when is family not important to anyone?)

It is a strange one though - here are these random people who you sometimes have nothing in common with except the fact that you have the same DNA running through you. This makes it difficult at times to say the least.

Take me and my brother and sister for example. I have to admit that we don't talk to each other as often as we should. In fact, if I'm going to be really honest we don't talk to each other at all. The only reason we know what's happened in each other's lives is because of the one thing that connects all of us - Mum.

There isn't really an excuse for it. Except that there always is isn't there? There's always something. My sister is a big high powered business lady person and never replies to texts or e-mails because she never has the time. She then comes home to 2 children, (although technically there are 4 children if you count the dog and the husband) so she never calls and then I feel bad about calling in case I'm bothering her so that never happens. My brother? Well he's just selfish. I'm going through a bit of a not liking him phase at the moment which is new for me because I've always thought he was the bees knees. He used to do the whole protective older brother thing and although it frustrated me how mean he could be to some of my boyfriends, I secretly liked it. At the moment though, I don't know, I just feel like I don't have anything in common with him, we have a completely different set of values and most of the time his general attitude to life and those around him annoys the hell out of me.

So no-one calls each other and then it gets harder to call each other because you haven't called each other. So nothing happens until Mum goes over to see one of them and I say I'll go with her.

"You'd better not die" I said to my Mum a while ago (I say quite strange things to my Mum at times, it's ok, we're cool with each other), "if you do the three of us will probably never see each other again."

I laughed but it actually hit me hard inside because it was at that point that I realised. Although we might be totally different people and would never be friends in the 'real' world, we are connected, we do have something fundamental in common, and if blood isn't enough to keep you together then what is?

At around the same time as this dawned on me, my friend introduced me to the Nie Nie Dialogues and from there I started reading Stephanie's sister's blog, cjane enjoy it. As I said in my previous post, this family is something else. You couldn't help but want to be part of it. And in Cjane's writing the importance of family shines though. Whether she's talking about her husband Chup and son The Chief, or when she was blogging about having 3 of her sister's children live with her while her sister was in hospital, or whether she's talking about another sister dropping by, it's perfectly clear - she loves her family. She doesn't have a bad word to say about them. Which is strange because surely they must bug each other sometimes? Surely they must be different people?

Maybe they do, maybe they don't and maybe they are and maybe they're not but what's important is that they're family. It doesn't matter if you aren't the same people, there's a bond there that runs deep and must act as some kind of anchor, pulling you in whenever you try to go astray. I'm sure that if some calamity should befall us then the others would be there immediately, doing everything they could to help. But it shouldn't come to that. It shouldn't take a disaster to reaffirm what you should already know.

So taking cjane as my inspiration I vow to be a better sister. To be less consumed with my own worries and to think and do more to solidify the bonds between my siblings. I will be undeterred by the fact that when I ask my brother when I can pop over to York (which is about 45 minutes away from Hull) he will say that he will have to "check the diary" and I will want to beat him round the head with a club saying with every swing "I. shouldn't. have. to. make. an. appointment. I'm. family." I will just say "Ok. When's good for you?" I will be undeterred that when I call my sister for a chat and she doesn't really have anything to say she doesn't make any effort whatsoever to further the conversation and will let it get to the point where there are uncomfortable silences on the end of the phone. I will just continue to blather away until I run out of things to say.

And I will try and not bitch about either of them.

(On a separate note about Cjane's blog. What I really love about it, apart from all the schmaltzy family stuff I just talked about it are the lovely pictures she puts on there and most of all her writing style. She writes in a way I wish I could and it makes me more than a little bit jealous that I can't.)