Family stories

When I was twenty-two years old my parents decided to separate, the news came as a shock to me. At that time I was not living with them, I had moved to a new city, got married and was expecting my first child.

I have never known precisely what were the reasons why the two of them decided to end a relationship that lasted more than twenty years and in which they had four children, my three siblings and me. My mother has never wanted to talk to me about it. The times I have asked her about it, she has been evasive.

Shortly after my first child was born, my father had moved to a new city, we did not communicate much, it was not a time of cell phones or internet. In that city he formed a new family and had two more children, a girl and a boy, a little younger than my older children.

One day my father contacted me and told me that he was moving to the same city as me. That news made me very excited because I was finally going to meet those two younger siblings.

I remember at Christmas time I would buy gifts for my children and younger siblings, and it was so funny to see how my children would lead their uncles who were younger than them in games. It was always hard for my children to understand that these two boys were their uncles. All the other uncles they knew, my other siblings and my wife's siblings were older people.

About ten years passed and the mother of my younger siblings moved with them to another city. From that moment on I had very little contact with them, time passed, they became adults, my father died and life went on. Now my sister lives in another country and my younger brother moved to my same city.

Last month my sister called me from the country where she lives, she asked me for time because she wanted to talk for a long time, she told me that she wanted to know things about the family, that surely I would know many things that she did not know.

In our first conversation she was very interested in knowing how my relationship with my father was when I was a child. I told her that I remembered it quite normal, my father was not very affectionate back then but not too severe either. When I asked her the same question her answer was different, she told me that with her in particular he was always very severe, perhaps because she was the only female of his five children.

The conversation became so animated that at one point I had to ask him for a short break to go make a coffee. Every time I have a good conversation I feel like drinking coffee, it is a ritual that has been with me since I was a university student.

We continued talking and realized that between the two of us we had the opportunity to reconstruct a good part of the family history. There were many things that she had experienced with my father that were unknown to me.

At one point she told me something that surprised me a lot: she told me that when my father passed the age of sixty, when she was in her teens, my father got into the habit of asking her to prepare a coffee for him in the afternoon.

Every time she brought it to him, he would invite her to sit down and, while she drank that cup of coffee very slowly, he would tell her stories about the time of her childhood, and in general about different moments in the life of the family.

Perhaps at that time my father already knew that her mother had decided to move to another city and that from that moment on it would be very difficult for them to see each other frequently.

I told my sister that I also had the habit of having coffee in the middle of the afternoon and that I also liked to talk with my wife about family stories, apparently this is kind of normal when you start to get older.

After that day we have continued our lively conversations, she can't get enough and neither can I, which actually has me very excited. I have commented to my sister that she is becoming a repository of our family history, something that so far has not been of interest to any of my children.

Now we agree on the best time to talk at length. I prepare my thermos of coffee and stand by when the Whatsapp message tells me that the time has come to continue spinning the family story together with my younger sister.

Thank you for your time.