Opportunity Lost?

Recently I've been scanning my grandmother's pictures onto CD Rom. Mainly because it's an updated format, it's easier to copy and use, and who wants a billion photo albums around? Really?

As I look through them I see myself at times when I was younger.

From the time I was about ten till I was starting high school I was an awkward child. If I had been a boy I would have probably been the husky tacky quiet-ish kid that played football... but I was a girl, so I was the husky tacky quiet one with the freckles.

Oh, I had freckles. Still do actually, but they have faded a lot (thank goodness) and aren't very noticeable anymore. I slowly gained some style and by the time I hit high school I think I had it figured out for my body build. But in the years I was just talking about... The pre-teen to early teen years, those were hard years. I think they are hard for everyone in one way or another. The point I was trying to make is that I wasn't a very cute kid (as far as my own opinion goes, and that wasn't just my personal opinion of myself at the time, but my opinion now as I look back at pictures of that time).

I didn't have any cousins that I was really close to. There were only really three that were anywhere near my age. One lived in Tulsa, one lived in California, and the other lived in Utah (which we visited often) but was pretty rebellious and I felt wasn't really interested in being friends with me. My sisters and I were closer to my mom's family than to my dad's, the grand kids on that side of the family were born in two main groups. The older group was just younger than my youngest aunts and the younger group was about ten years younger than me.

Does anyone else ever feel like they were born at the wrong time? I do sometimes. Not that I'm not grateful for all the cool things we have these days! But I do wonder if maybe I had been born a few years earlier I might have been able to be more connected. At least as far as my extended family was concerned. I really wish at times that I had fallen into one of the two groups of grandkids.

Even now as I look at my cousins I don't think they would be very interested in me or my life, probably because they never had any reason to be. Why would they be curious about someone they never really knew? Age difference makes such a huge difference as kids, and I think that with cousins and family etc, it continues to make a huge difference even as adults because you remember what a big thing it was as kids. That and with family you tend to slip back into old roles when you all come together.

I had an aunt when I was little (under 8) that I was really close to. I adored her. Every time my parents would take us to my grandma's house the first thing I would do was quickly run down to her room to see if she was around. She is ten years older than me but somehow we had a really good connection.

Somehow as I got older that connection was lost. I moved to Idaho, she got married, I became the awkward teenager, she had kids of her own and then moved away from Utah and my grandma.

As a teenager I remember wishing that I was more of a priority for someone, anyone, in my extended family But I realized that they all had their own lives and their own kids to be worried about and that was just the way things were. I wouldn't expect them to put me above their lives, that was unreasonable.

But now I look back and wonder if anything might have been done to save that special relationship with my aunt. If I might have been able to be a light in her life that I didn't realize that she needed at the time. If I might have been able to help in some way. I know I was just a kid, but somehow I was able to hold onto a relationship with a friend I moved away from in the 2nd grade through all this time... why couldn't I hold onto the relationship with my aunt too?

Today she is going to school and working after a nasty divorce. Trying her best to support her youngest child... the older two are old enough for college now and I don't think (I don't know for sure) that they have a very good relationship with her. She has been hurt by life and doesn't like to let others know when she is in need of anything. She is very independent. Because of this, I don't think I can very easily renew our friendship... on top of that she still lives in another state.

If only her kids could see the lady I saw! And still see glimmers of.

She is truly one of the few people that I thought the world of as a child and as I have grown, my opinion of her never changed. She is compassionate and puts her heart and soul into things. She is spunky and has a great sense of humor. She defies the odds in all things gender related. She excels at math and in fields that, to this day, are still male dominated. She loves her tools... and she is just generally a good person.

Oh, if only I hadn't allowed our relationship to slip... I would truly adore having that relationship back.

I don't know, maybe I can do something about that...