You Can't Pick Your Relatives

My sister got married this past Saturday. I couldn't be happier for her, and it was an absolutely flawless event - except for one tiny little thing, which is of course exactly the kind of fodder that weblogs are made of.

I have these relatives. We've all got one - the uncle who is still living with his parents, the aunt who's a not-so-closet drunk, the cousin serving a second or third sentence at the Federal pen (I actually have one of those). Sadly, I have more than one of these wish-they-were-related-to-someone-else relatives, although only one in particular really comes into play in this story. She is a second cousin (the daughter of a first cousin - I've never been clear on the distinction between the "second" and "once removed" categorizations) , and in her defense, she comes from a whole family line of questionable judgment. Somehow, my aunt took a left turn where my dad went right, and amid teenage pregnancies, divorces, an alcoholic husband - whom she married more than once - and other less-than-stellar choices, she ended up with kids who repeated many of her mistakes and even compounded a few of them. It was inevitable, I suppose, that one of them would bring this trend right to the otherwise beautiful wedding of my sister - it is one of the main reasons I didn't have a big wedding myself. So here's the scoop:

Children were not invited to this wedding. Let me clarify: specifically because of this cousin's monster 3-year-old son, children were not invited to this wedding. The whole point of excluding all the other children was to avoid inviting this one child, and to try to do so in a nice, non-confrontational way that would preserve the family peace - although why we feel the need to be diplomatic to these particular people, I fail to understand. I say, let this branch of the family tree fall, put it in the Whisper Chipper, and ship it off to mulch someone else's garden!

But I digress: children were not included, specifically to avoid having to deal with this one child. And let me emphasize that this is no ordinary 3-year old boy who is just poorly behaved; that we could've handled. No, no. This child is different. His foul mouth makes Ozzy Osbourne look like a fairy princess. I am not easily shocked or offended, and yet when I see this kid at family events I just want to cover my ears and hide under a rock. He is physically destructive - and I don't mean impish and mischievous the way little boys are, I mean dangerous. I am betting that he will be incarcerated before he turns 15. No, make that 12. And in fairness to the boy, it is not his fault. His father's version of discipline is to yell: "stop f***ing climbing that f***ing bathroom stall! Get the f*** down here!" (This was at the wedding reception, mind you.) His mother, who is actually a very smart girl who sadly followed in her mother and grandmother's footsteps and dropped out of high school to begin breeding before she reached legal adulthood, does nothing about it. Who wouldn't feel overwhelmed by that situation?

So, this boy came to the wedding. Once my mother had picked her jaw back up off the floor, she pointed the way to the nursery. (Of course, she failed to mention this to me, knowing that I would have left the altar, bridesmaid dress and bouquet and all, and taken my 11-month old baby girl out of that same nursery - she assures me the that the poor woman who got stuck supervising the kids insists that he was actually very well-behaved). Even his own grandmother, my aunt, was furious when she saw them walk in with the kid, but what can polite, respectable people do? (I say f*** respectability and physically remove them to the sidewalk, but hey, nobody asked me.)

And then he came to the reception. Where he proceeded to taunt us all by hovering around the cake table - oh yes, I have a picture - but miraculously was swept off by his mother just in the nick of time (my sister, in her wedding gown, was personally defending the cake up to that point). But the crowning moment was when a cousin from the other side of the family came back to the table after calling his wife on his cell phone outside, and reported that "some kid was out there blowing out and then breaking all the candles." "Would that kid happen to be a little blond with a mohawk?" I asked, knowing the answer. "Yep." Great. That kid broke 9 out of 12 glass luminaries that my mother had bought to light the steps up to the reception hall. BROKE them. Not because he just happened to bang into them - 9 of them? Come on. Because he was systematically going about breaking them, smashing them all over the sidewalk. And where were his parents at this juncture? Excellent question! Nobody seems to know. Knowing that I would be likely to inflict actual bodily harm on either the child or his mother, I sat quietly stewing in my chair, opting not to tell my mother (who didn't find out until the event was over, thank goodness) or deal with it myself (I was determined to continue enjoying myself, and what could be done about it at that point anyway?).

All that ultimately happened was that my usually even-keeled father delivered a stern reproach to another cousin (he couldn't bring himself to deliver it directly to his sister - which has often been part of the problem in her life, I suspect) in the hopes that word would pass. There's no hope of collecting any recompense for the candles, because this mother doesn't have a nickel to her name to begin with, and it's frankly not the point. My sister, who is generally the more forgiving and understanding sibling when it comes to family misbehavior, is steadfastly insisting we officially disown them. And no, she was not in any way a "bridezilla" - she is just that upset that my cousin could be so disrespectful, not only by bringing the little twit when she was explicitly instructed to leave him home, but by then letting him terrorize the event. I, of course, am all for disowning her! I've been suggesting we cut ties with that gang for years, but as usual, people are slow to get on my bandwagon.

No, disowning them won't undo what's been done or really make any other difference in their lives, but it would sure bring peace of mind to mine. I look forward to future family events where I don't have to worry about them because they won't have been included in the first place, and I won't have to feel the least bit guilty about it. Not that I really did before.