Jennifer Horgan: The magic of cousins — aren't we truly blessed to have them?
How many children are spending time right now in the company of their cousins, I wonder? How many are sharing a week or two on an Irish beach or abroad? Picture: iStock
On some nights it was Billy Joel’s 'Piano Man'. We’d cycle the Kerry path together, one of us on either side of its grassy middle, singing our nearly-teenage hearts out, craning our necks to gulp the white stars against the black, dark, salty air.
On other nights it was En Vogue’s 'Don’t Let Go'. The Kerry wildlife no doubt scarpered. Talented singers we were not and more than a few dud notes would have lashed those innocent ditches.
Still we belted those '90s hits out with abandon. “What’s it going to be / Coz I, I can’t pretend / Don’t you want to be / More than friends…”
And that was exactly what we were, myself and Anna — not lovers, like the song suggests, but more than friends, far more, and yet, friends also. We were that magical thing, so often born of long, warm, childhood summers.
We were, and still are, cousins.
How many children are spending time right now in the company of their cousins, I wonder? How many are sharing a week or two on an Irish beach or abroad? How many are returning to cousins in Poland, Portugal, or Peru?
How many are being sent to their cousins while their parents work? How many are welcoming cousins home from England, or America or beyond? Many, I hope. Because there is nothing in the world to match it.
These young cousins won’t grasp the significance of the time they’re spending together yet — to do so would be to lessen its magic — but someday, maybe come their 30s or 40s, they’ll get it. The joy that is being with your cousins, those truly special people who have the potential to offer us a steadying, an anchoring, without asking for much in return.
Far more attention is given to the impact of our immediate family, as is understandable. As Richard Hogan’s brilliant new book highlights, our immediate family shapes and chisels us, for good or for ill.
Small details make giant differences: whether you are the youngest or the eldest, for instance; your attachment to your parent; your strengths and weaknesses in the context of your siblings’ strengths and weaknesses.
As Hogan outlines, we must do considerable work to break any of the negative influences of our first family home if we want to rid our adult homes of its tired emotional furniture.
Cousins are different. They are a step beyond the immediate, carrying less weight and exacting less force on who we are, or might become.
Often, as was the case with myself and Anna, the cousins positioned together, are the same age. A cousin is like a twin and yet, crucially, there is no sibling power play. There is only a comforting mirror image, a familiar feature or two, a shared knowledge of an original family home, the home my father and her mother once shared.
There is only an old family song perhaps, a Hollywood-style story passed down, a treasured bracelet on a wrist, a black and white picture on the wall.
Through our cousins, we are placed in the boughs of a wider family tree. We are made a little stronger, a little more resilient. We become aware of the tree’s deep roots and yet there is enough distance in between that there are no strangling branches. There is both expansive freedom and anchoring all at once.
It's a hard act to follow. It’s a difference sometimes felt in friendships, particularly in those long friendships that span decades, just as cousin relationships do. Such friendships can lack the same stretch, the same elasticity.
In friendship, there is a degree of active commitment, of work to be done, attention to be paid. Not so with cousins. We might not see a cousin for years and years but the glimpse of their features across a room, a crowded bar perhaps, will be enough to jettison us back to a childhood ease and comfort that’s unattainable elsewhere. Such is the stretch.
It’s a topic best avoided, always feeling a little like treason or treachery. Cousins are perhaps better off ignoring that shadowy ‘other’ side of one another.
My husband has the unusual situation of having ‘double cousins.’ His mum’s sister married his dad’s brother. Genetically, they are more like half siblings. Sharing the same four grandparents, their bond is very special. There is strength in numbers and they support each other with the strength of a clan, a tribe impenetrable.
My two ‘sides’ are vastly different. On my dad’s side I have dozens of cousins. Most of them I don’t know but I feel a kinship. I like seeing their faces and would never like to hear a bad word said about them.
On my mother’s side I have only four, and there is a closeness there I treasure. Our mothers lost their parents young and it strengthened the bond between them. Their early loss is a quiet presence in our lives too, and the force of it is a bonding one.
Now that I’m a parent myself, I take mental pictures of my children with their cousins all the time. I have a weird relationship with photographs of my children. Visit my house and you’ll be doing well to see any evidence of my children on my walls.
Photographs of children make me sad because they are children so briefly. My strongest wish is for them to grow out of childhood, and yet, I find the recording of time difficult. Hence my mental pictures only, stored as memories, perfect stills, should I ever need them.
This is one: My daughters and my son, sandy-footed, linking arms with their cousins on the couch, mouths open, watching their third round of the same film that week. Wonderful. Knowing without doing anything, that myself and my brother have gifted them something eternal.
And for us adult siblings too it provides a coming back together, seeing our childhood home replicated but without the intensity, the rivalries, the small and the bigger pities. It’s like a triumph of sorts, a therapy without the work of therapy.
My wish this week is for cousins in Ireland to build such memories together and for their parents to feel endlessly good about it. It’s so easy for us to get dragged into the negative but aren’t we lucky to have cousins, if we have them? Aren’t we truly blessed?
And with that I’m back with Anna again, my bum raised up from the bike’s seat, my hands stretched into the Kerry sky, my voice rising into the years to come, spent so far apart and yet always, in some small way, together.
