Family is a complicated thing. I love my parents and brothers and sisters and I think we're a much closer than a lot of families. (When you grow up sharing one bathroom between eleven people, a bedroom with anywhere from one to eight siblings and occasionally a bed with one or more siblings, that tends to happen.) Sometimes there's drama or hurt feelings, but for the most part we enjoy spending time together and get along when we do. There are definitely issues that have carried over from childhood and plenty of personality conflicts but (from my perspective at least) they don't generally stand in the way of us feeling like a family. In fact, for many of us, our family members are our best friends and the only people we truly feel free to be ourselves with.

Extended family is a little different. Maybe it's because we have such a large family that we didn't feel the need for exceptionally close relationships with extended family growing up, maybe because we lived farther away from the rest of our extended family than they did from each other, maybe because many of us are introverted and/or shy and don't find it easy to talk to people we don't know well or maybe it involves interpersonal dynamics between my parents and their parents and siblings that I never understood as a child and still don't really grasp today...Whatever the reason, I don't feel particularly close to or comfortable with most of my extended family. This makes family reunions awkward, to say the least.

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