Family ties

YT has a house guest staying – my half-sister. She’s here all the way from Canada and what’s particularly interesting about this visit is that, before now, we’d probably spent only about 10 hours in each other’s company since she was a baby. Why? Well, for starters, she’s 19 years younger than me, and was born three years after I had begun my Life as an Adult (g’on, you do the math), and not long after that I moved to another continent, and visited very infrequently. And now she’s occupying my guest room and, well, I guess you could say we’re getting ‘caught up’.

Incidentally, this is not my only half-sibling. On my father’s side I have three. One from my father’s second marriage, two from his third [and current] marriage. Meanwhile, my father’s wife has a son from a previous relationship, and my mother’s husband [father of half-sister occupying the guest room] has four children from a previous marriage. EPI and I, of course, have a combined brood of four – three are his, and one is mine. AAH also has a half-sister in Germany, on her father’s side.

The YT family tree, ladies and gentlemen!

ILLEGITEMATE WHAT?
While this may seem extraordinarily complicated to some people, this is no big deal here in Iceland. Families here tend to be cobbled together from various parts, hence the oft-cited quip: ‘My children, your children and our children.’ Partly this is because it’s no big deal for children to be born out of wedlock here. In fact, many people ‘accidentally’ have one child at a [relatively] young age, then go on to educate themselves, meet their life partner or whatever, and then proceed to start a family. The child that is born out of wedlock is normally accepted as part of both families – i.e. the father’s and the mother’s – with the normal sort of access to grandparents, etc. and with all sides of the different families showing up for birthdays, graduations, and such. In fact, a child like that will often have three sets of families – the family of the parent s/he grew up with, the family of the parent s/he didn’t grow up with, and the family of the new partner of the parent s/he lives with. All together at the child’s birthday party.

The other thing is that, as in other Western countries, the divorce/separation rate is high here. People divorce and remarry and perhaps do it again, and then you’ve got a trail of stepchildren from this relationship and so on and when that happens I have to confess that it does sometimes get confusing. I was at a wedding last weekend, for instance, where a relative was getting married, and I sat at a table with the former step-children of the bride’s mother. Who also happen to be the bride’s half-siblings.

All right. Time to stop confusing those poor readers who just came here for the weather.

THE WEATHER, AHEM
It’s raining. We’ve had some heavy duty showers today, although at the moment it looks like it’s slowed to a trickle. It’s a bit windy, and definitely very fall-like. Not cold, though. Current temps are 10°C and daybreak was at 05.43, nightfall at 21.05.