It's cool it's cool to love your family

I am the oldest of all my maternal cousins. There are sixteen of us, all but fourteen of whom are boys. (If I had paternal cousins, I'd be the oldest of them too.) There is a 20 year gap between me and the youngest cousin, who is darling, and it's weird to me that's she's already in kindergarten.

The problem is that it's always felt like I've been significantly older. My brother is the next oldest, but not counting him, the next oldest cousin is three years younger than I, the cousin after her is four years younger. So, when we all lived in Utah, I was 6 and they were babies (Continuing down the line, my mom and her siblings seemed to have kids around the same time, so each age group now has three or four kids of approximately the same age.) In Texas, it didn't matter much because we saw them so rarely. When we moved back to Utah, I was 14, and in jr. high/high school, and they were still in elementary school. Family gatherings were this weird thing, because I was too young to want to be with the adults for long and too old to be with the kids the whole time.

Though that age gap seemingly narrows as you get older, I still graduated college before anyone else even graduated high school. Just as my younger cousins were getting the hang of being college and being adults, I moved to DC. Even now, one has just recently graduated college, two have gotten married, but I've now been in the professional world for coming up on five years and have a Masters. We're all getting closer and closer to that age thing not really mattering, but it still does, because our level of life experience just isn't the same. We do live in different places and have the internet, namely Facebook, to get to know each other now, but it's hard to create a personal relationship (rather than just "keeping up with each other") when none has really existed before.

It's a strange place to be. I love my family and my cousins, and I hope they know that. I'd like to be real friends with them at some point, if that's in the cards, but it's okay if it doesn't happen for awhile. At the very least, I hope they know have a pretty cool older cousin on their side, no matter what.