I’ve been on it for nearly two years now, and I no longer have panic attacks when blasts from the past hit me up for a “friend” link.

The first time one of my maternal cousins dropped a note, I logged out of Facebook for a month. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s not an ill-will thing. It’s more of a “please don’t make me remember what our childhood was like because it was insufferable and even thinking your name brings up terrible memories” thing. Kind of like what it must be like for those that go through a battle together. Bound for life, integral to the healing, but just really tough to deal with.

But now… not so much. I have actually been carrying on a conversation with one of my Long Losts for the past few months, and I love it! Of course, we were closest in age (that’s a really big deal in a family where we were 2 of 156 grandchildren and 126 great-grandchildren - as of the count done in 1987), so relating to each other is easier than it has been with some of the others. Yet it isn’t like we had a friendship from childhood as a starting point. He was there, around the house, for sleepovers when I was in footie pajamas and he was in Spidey Underoos. He and/or his mom made the occasional trip to The Cottage with us. And of course there were the dozens of funerals (inevitably in the coldest winters) that would have the clan flocking to our version of Deliverance in Northern New Brunswick. But our lives as cousins or friends seemed to end when Howard (the old Indian) died in 1987. Without its patriarch, there was no family.

And with very much pleasure, my mother’s family cut me off completely when she died - I pretty much did the same to them, too. It was the healthier option. Do you know there is actually a sort of “support” group on the Interwebs for us descendants? Where we regurgitate shit to get it out of our nightmares, and then go back to ignoring each other? Every family ought to have one!

So yeah, the panic attack thing isn’t foolish or overly dramatic. I’d say you “had to be there”, but I wouldn’t wish that on you. I am just so thrilled that I have been able to connect with my Long Lost and get past the hyperventilation phase. He was fun as a kid, and he’s interesting and cool as a grownup. And yeah, I did make it a point to tease him about the Underoos.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 6:57 am and is filed under Personal, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.