It’s not a story, really. Yet perhaps it is the beginning of all the stories.

I had a conversation with my eight year old granddaughter a few days ago. She was having a hard time watching her twelve and fourteen year old sisters at a party with their friends and realizing, not for the first time, that she did not belong in their group.

“Nana,” she asked me with tears spilling out her eyes, “Were you the youngest in your family?”

“I was” I told her.

“Did you feel left out?”

“I did,” I said.

And then we went to Walmart and bought a blue dragon off her Christmas list and it didn’t fix anything, but sometimes you just do what you can do.

So I have been thinking about family dynamics and how we are shaped by these very complicated relationships.

I am the youngest of six (by a whole generation) and Paul is the second of eight. Needless to say we had very different childhoods. But then there is the family we made together, and they too had very different childhoods.

I know because they have told me that our six kids feel they grew up in different families. They feel that way because it’s true. The first four were all two years apart, were raised by very young and very poor parents and were shaped by who we were then and by their own experiences of those years. The younger ones came six years later, were raised in a more traditional church by older and sometimes more relaxed parents. Depending on your perspective, you missed out on the advantages the other group had. The older ones took note that the younger ones had rooms to themselves and opportunities that they missed out on. The younger ones missed out on the memories that the four shared that they would never be a part of. But what I know, and what we all know if we are honest, is that families, no matter how well intentioned, inflict wounds on us which are not always obvious to those on the outside or sometimes even to those on the inside.

Yet when we come together as adults, those are not typically the stories we tell. Rather we tell the ones that remind us that, for better or worse, we belong to one another and we try as best we can to find commonality and kinship perhaps in spite of, as much as because of, our childhoods.

I also know that sometimes families fracture. Sometimes those fractures heal and sometimes they don’t. And who is to say the how or the why? Perhaps only God knows.

I am grateful that as adults, my kids are figuring out how to care for and support one another across the age differences, woundings, physical miles and sometimes differing ideologies. And I am so very grateful that this Thanksgiving these guys will come together from three different states with various and sundry littles. To tell the stories, to make new memories and to continue to bridge the gap.

So hang in there, Tacy. You belong more than you think you do. And the story is not over yet.