My mother was one of 20 children. Her mother was pregnant 22 times. Unthinkable. They had a potato farm in northern Maine. Out of the 22 pregnancies, there was one stillbirth, and one child, Joanne, died when she was two. I don't know how old my mother was when that occurred but it is one of only a few things she of which she spoke concerning her growing up years. There was one set of twins, bringing the total to 20.
Does the birth order thing apply to that many kids? If so, my mother was the tenth, making her the proverbial middle child. Guess somebody had to be number 10. I tend to attribute that to her eccentricities. Some of this oddness about her was charming, and there was a whole side which today would be medicated.
Oddly, I keep in touch with nobody. I have cousins upon cousins upon cousins and 2nd cousins and cousins triply removed, and I think more than half of my uncles or aunts are since passed away. When the kids were growing up and starting to date I would tell them, (not entirely joking) to get a family history. It wouldn't be a long shot if there were to be a familial connection, and I don't know where all these people are.
My youngest brother tells a funny story about buying pot from someone for three years before discovering that it was a cousin of ours.
Over the years, some of the cousins have attempted to created a connection between all of the relations. I gave a try at correspondence or attending a family reunion, but found that I was not interested in keeping in touch with these people, and in fact didn't even like a lot of them. It might have been therapeutic to keep a relationship going with the cousins, since we all had weird parent stories. I studied addiction for awhile and I have to tell you...there has to be a familial connection to addiction, whether genetic or learned behavior. Out of the 20 kids, (10 girls, 10 boys), all became addicts of some kind...all of the boys became alcoholics, some of the girls (my mother) became alcoholics, but tended toward pill addictions. One aunt was immensely overweight. They were all arrogant and cruel. At least the ones I knew.
My mother's father died well before I was born. I never heard a nice thing said about him. My mother's mother died when I was two, so I didn't know her, but it seemed to me while growing up that she was always present. This grandmother had two young teenage daughters still at home when she died. They both lived with us at different times. There was a lot of screaming between my mother and my young aunts during those times. Even looking back with an adult perspective I have no idea what that was about.
My twin uncles' story is kind of Steven Kingish...Roger married Lois. They had a son, Stevie. Then Roger died. Then his twin Roderick married the now widowed Lois, and they had a daughter, Genevieve. Then they got divorced, and now Roderick has declared himself gay, and there have been rumors that he is a child molester. See why I am not driven to attend family reunions?
I'll save my father's side of thing for a whole other post...he was one of 14 kids!
Peace,
Elfscooter
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