International Day of Families

Apparently, every May 15th it’s the International Day of Families. It’s as good a reason as any to pay tribute to my family.

I come from a bit of an unusual family and I still think it’s a cool one. My parents were married in September 1960 and nine months later my oldest brother was born. The family soon expanded and by the end of 1966 my parents had four children. In 1967 they moved to Israel and in 1968 my family looked like this…

My oldest brother died after an accident in early 1969 and the family then came to look like this (yes, we had an old olive press in the middle of the living room)…

I was born in the spring of 1970, in 1973 my parents adopted two babies of Palestinian origin (seven months apart in age) and in 1976, this was our family…

At the end of the 1970s an Ethiopian girl aged 16 came to our family, followed by an Ethiopian boy aged 11 and just before we moved away from Israel in 1980, our family looked like this (eight kids and two dogs in total):

In 1980, when I was 10 years old, we packed up our VW van and with a caravan in tow we moved to Germany where my father had accepted a new job.

Six years later my family looked like this, with a new second family dog after our old little black dog had passed away (the dog was called Dunya, and we always used to impatiently urge her to ‘mach was’ (‘do something’) when she would dawdle about doing her business)…

Another four years later, this was our family, with yet another second dog after Dunya had died. By then several siblings and I who were in school and university lived in a house in The Netherlans while my parents still lived in Germany. My oldest Ethiopian sister was drawing away from us (and we very sadly have no contact with her anymore now) and the first sister-in-law joined the family. From here on in I’m blurring the pictures as we get older and look more like we do now…

The family has slowly grown as we got married and had children and for my parents 50th wedding anniversary in 2010, this was us…

Our family is still changing. There have been separations and divorces and we all deeply miss my father. There will be additions now as well, as the grandkids start getting life partners. Last November, for my mother’s 86th birthday, this was our whole group (minus only a niece and nephew living in South Korea and Israel)…

I now have a little family of my own that I am also extremely proud of and my children too are really growing up.

Junior has just returned from travels on his own to Istanbul and Barcelona and has been cuddling our very old cat and catching up on sleep. He has also decided on a university course that he will start in the fall (Sport Management) and I think he is gearing up to spread his wings and fly out of the nest (also symbolized by the tattoo he got a few months ago)…

Mini-me has been studying very hard for her final exams while we were away. She relished the time alone and the quiet to do so and our black cat decided to ‘help’ her…

Our dining table has become a study station and she is relieved that at least the math part of the exams is over (and that it went alright). Back at it for another week and a half and then she will be done with secondary school. In the fall she will move on to university for her nursing studies.

Families can be complicated things. There’s always something going on, positive and negative, but despite all problems that we too have encountered along the way, I am deeply grateful for my family and deeply impressed with my parents who have built all this and given us, their children, such a good foundation to build our own families.

Families are never static, they always develop and evolve, they diminish or expand, there’s always an ebb and a flow. Sometimes we are lucky and are born into good families, other times we have to build them ourselves, whether with partners and/or children or friends or even pets. We all need a place to call home, whether alone or with others, where we feel safe and secure, with loved ones to fall back on. On this International Day of Families I wish that for everyone…