I was having a family dinner with my cousins and aunt from out of state and they were talking with my dad about relatives from all over the country I’d never met. This particular Aunt and cousins used to live in Melbourne, so I knew them, but was a stranger to everyone they were mentioning. Trading old stories and memories of one Uncle or another. I really didn’t have much input apart from ‘did you ever meet him?’ being occasionally directed at me.

I started to realise that it was me, not them, that weren’t really a part of the family. all my life I’d thought that me and my dad and my nan, who lived in Victoria, were kind of the core family and the others who lived in mainly Perth were the outliers who were out of touch with everyone. but hearing the amount of stories and gossip they had about the rest of our family made me really consider that it was actually the three of us who were disconnected and not really a part of the main group. it’s odd to think that all my life I’d thought that they weren’t ‘really part of the family’ when they’d probably felt the same way about us all along.