I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown.

Family relationships and connections are complicated.

There are people in my life that I call cousin who aren't related to me at all.

They're the children of my mother's oldest friends.

We grew up together, sharing holidays, birthdays, and other significant

events, so they feel like cousins to me. I also have aunts and uncles who are actually

distant cousins of my parents, or in some cases old family friends, no blood relation at all.

My blood family is large, but my extended family of unofficial cousins, aunts, and uncles, is even larger.

As I said, it's complicated. Add divorce into the mix, and complicated feels like such

an understatement it borders on euphemism. Not only do I have an ex-husband, I have ex-in-laws. When you marry into a family, you are sort of adopted

into that family. When you leave that family, you have to navigate how to continue or end those other

relationships. I know people who are divorced, but who are still in touch with

their former mothers and fathers-in-law, or their former brothers or sisters-in-law. I know

divorced couples who still spend holidays together, even with new partners, spouses, children.

Everyone passing the potatoes and casseroles around one big table.

I also know divorced people who are very happy to have made a clean break, to have no contact with anyone in their ex's

inner circle. As with most parts of life, there is no right way. There are many different ways

to be a family, and there are many different ways to take care of

yourself and your own well-being inside of a family. That can be complicated, too.

Today's poem unpacks some of what happens when families change because of death or divorce or other upheavals.

I admire the way it looks not only at the variables, what must necessarily change, but also at the constants.

Real Estate by Richard Seichen.

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