Facebook reaches across space and time to wrench my guts out

In this day and age where possibly everyone is either directly accessible or traceable through the Internet, I think we could safely say that there is absolutely no way that any kind of skeleton in the closet could remain undisturbed. Not with google and facebook available to anyone and everyone.

So to cut a long and tedious story short, I lost touch with most of my relatives on my father's side shortly after my parents separated some 25 years ago. Well, excluding the relatives that wanted to stay in touch just to see how we were doing. Not because they wanted to help (God forbid), but just because they were curious to see if a single mother with 3 kids would sink or swim.

Anyway, during a conversation the other day with a colleague which turned into a debate about the accessibility of just about everyone on facebook, I did a search for my dad's brother's older daughter on Facebook whom I had not seen in 2 decades. And there she was, complete with photographs of an entire side of the family I had not seen in just as long. The last time we met, we were just children, trying to tug more coupons out of the machine at Chuck E. Cheese. Now we are closer to the age our parents were at the time, and probably no less clued in to all the family intrigue that now continues to keep us separate, spiritually and emotionally.

She's now on my "Friends" list, and we exchanged a few emails, but it's just impossible to bridge the space between us, so I stopped replying. It does not help that she looks like my dad's sister now, the same one who told me when I was 9 years old that (i) the only reason my parents got married was because my mother was expecting me; and (ii) I was lucky to have been born since my dad also managed to knock up 2 girlfriends at the same time and he picked my mom to marry. No one in the family knows what happened to the other baby, except maybe my mother but I suspect if I ever asked her, that conversation would end very quickly and it would not end well.