Speaking of Family

It’s coming up to my Dad’s birthday. I haven’t seen him in a while, well since last Christmas. That is pretty much how I roll and the rest of the family knows that. Anyway I sent him an email asking if he wanted to come up to my place for a meal for his birthday. He declined saying that he was over the whole family thing, and while he was still avaiable to help out if there was anything he could do, he wasn’t going to be doing anything more than that.

You know what. I am cool with that. Told him too.

See I am happy to let him keep what is his.

I know when others in the family have heard the same thing from my dad they have been shocked and saddened. I guess they thought they owned part of him, or that he owed them some of himself. I don’t feel that. I have no expectations of how he should be as a grandfather to my kids either.  I never knew my grandparents and it never hurt me none.

When we came to Australia from England I was just a toddler. We had no family close by in Australia, and my mother and father were fiercely independent. Living with no safety net seems natural and normal to me, to others that would be incredibly scary.

I remember my mother saying to me once “Allison, you always seem to take these big risks in your life and they work out”. To me they never seemed like risk, they were just “doing”

Draft that i couldn’t decide whether to post or not.