Tonight, I met up with my cousin, his wife, and their two young children, ages 3.5 and 5, for dinner in Hermosa Beach. The last time I saw my cousin was at my wedding over 3.5 years ago; the last time I saw his wife was about two months before that when she was about to pop to give birth to number 2. Their lives have changed quite a bit since then. Hopefully, it won’t be another 3.5 years before we see each other again.

My cousin and his wife seem to be doing pretty well; they seem quite content in their life, which is completely devoid of his mom, who is my aunt, my dad’s younger sister. No one in the family keeps in much contact with her because she’s always been an extreme drama queen, and he told me tonight that he had zero contact with her.

My mom knew I was going to see my cousin this evening, so she suggested I tell him to reconcile with her. I see no reason to intervene and suggest that with someone who is so toxic. If a person cannot find her own faults and admit them to her only child, then in my opinion, she’s not really worth being in touch with. She’d enrich none of their lives. She’d only create more problems and more anxiety for everyone. And my cousin’s fear is that she will not only have a negative impact on his children, her grandchildren, but that his kids will see their grandmother’s negative effect on their dad and be ill effected by it.

Being estranged from your family is hard to say the least. Everyone judges you negatively about it and blames you. But I genuinely think my cousin did the right thing both for himself and his wife, but also for their two kids.