Honorary Family

I'm going to Tampa today for two nights.  My honorary nephew is having is bar mitzvah.  I'm very excited about this.  His mother was unknowingly in labor with him at one of my parties 13 years ago.  I saw more of him as a young child than my own nephew.  I babysat him, changed his diapers, sang to him...all things I didn't get to do with my nephew, who is now 7, and niece, who will be 5 in 2 months.  It hurts when I think about it.


Sometimes I think people with children don't realize how much of an outsider some people without children (such as myself) feel.  I'm talking about the folks who know that other folks wanted children but it just didn't happen.  My own sister always "forgets" to tell me about my nephew's sports schedule.  Thursday night I found out my nephew's basketball team made it to the playoffs and then championships...after his team won the championship game.  I live 30 minutes away and could easily have arranged to leave work early to make the game.


My mother had a cousin named Billy that never married or had children and was always a little bit of an oddball (for reasons not related to his marital or fatherhood status).  She always included him in our family functions - his own local brother certainly never did (he had another one in CA).  I used to tell her that I was going to wind up being the "Billy" of the family...no one to help him other than Mom when he got old.  No one to visit him in hospice other than Mom, Grandma, Dad, and me...not even his local brother. Everyone other than my mother and grandmother treated him like an afterthought. She used to scoff when I said that.  I still think I'm right.


So back to this weekend.  Lauren, the bar mitzvah boy's mother, often treats me more like family than my own sister does, and I love her for it.  She's the one that drove 5 hours to come to Mom's funeral. She brought her children, with no request from me, to visit my grandma in the nursing home.  To get my sister to do that was always a struggle.  So when she asked me if I'd take her cousin with me over to Tampa since his wife would already be further north in the state and he'd have to take a second car, I said yes.  Even though it meant totally rearranging my schedule and route, I said yes.  I'd do just about anything I could to make my honorary sister happy.


Regarding food, I'm having a shake for breakfast this morning, and then I'm going to try to make healthy choices but I'm not going to force myself to be "on program" with the corresponding guilt when I go off program.  I'm not lugging my shakes and blender with me.  It's just too much of a hassle. I'm just going to enjoy myself with my honorary family and let it be what it is.