"Daddy, guess what? We are going to open a restaurant called Lobsters. It was Destiny's idea."
"I feel like our family is alone - like there's someone missing but there's not. I miss my cousins and I want to have a play date with Zara."
I like to capture these quotes because they summarise the little girl who said them and because sometimes they cut to the quick in a way more complex language just can't. The first quote I just thought was funny - the disclaimer at the end that it was Destiny's idea so she wouldn't think she was opening a restaurant named after my mortal enemy. The second quote made me deeply sad in a way I can't really communicate. I remember when cousin Stephen spent the night at Windrush and we were probably the same age as she is. The next day when he left, I can still transport myself back to that feeling of loneliness when the community you've constructed even for a day leaves. It's the same feeling I had on the last day of college or boarding school when everything's packed up, the personality of the room stripped away to leave unfriendly walls, and most people have already left and the campus is just an empty ghost - the laughter, heartache, and life removed. It's just a place where something used to be. So her comment comes on the heels of us having been back from our whirlwind trip to see some of her Aussie cousins (Dexter, Hugo, and Martha Rose) which she absolutely adored in a way that welded a smile on her face for the whole trip. Now it was over. We were back on the train track of life headed from one week to the next. She missed the larger family. She missed the community. We can try all we want but we can't be more people. So we have to get out more. We have to jump off the train when we can and explore the landscape. We need to paint a landscape that has more people. So we obviously arranged a play date but also made a pact to break out of this house, this rut, a bit more and see more people ourselves. Send us lists of babysitters.
I've quoted this before here but it bears repeating in full from Kurt Vonnegut:
"Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.
What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them.
Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.
A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.
When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this:“You are not enough people!”
I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who has six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family.
They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty it was, or handsome.
Wouldn't you have loved to be that baby?”
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