Summer Cousins

Two Weeks, Our Three Kids, and the Shoulders I’m Standing On

I stood on my mother-in-law’s screened-in porch and watched my kids fish with their Uncle Nick.

They were chanting. Team Uncle Nick. Team Uncle Nick. Still going, the afternoon after he’d bought them candy at a baseball game and openly campaigned for their loyalty like a man running for office. He’d made it a bit. Buy the candy, earn the chant. We all laughed.

But now, the candy was gone, and the chant wasn’t. They were still saying it, a day later, casting lines into Grandma’s lake with the uncle they see once a year. The bit had become real when nobody was looking. That’s what a good uncle does. He shows up goofy and generous, and somewhere in the noise of it, he becomes someone your kids belong to.

And I’ll tell you what I was actually thinking, standing there. I was thinking I didn’t make that happen. I couldn’t have. You can’t make the fun. You can’t engineer the connection. You can’t script a five-year-old into loving their uncle. All you can do is set the conditions. Get everyone to the same lake. Be there. Be present. Do the best you can and then get out of the way and hope the magic shows up.

That day it showed up. Team Uncle Nick, the day after the candy ran out.

That’s what the whole trip was, if I’m honest. Two weeks of setting conditions and watching the magic.

We started with a small piece of good luck. The first-ever direct flight from Idaho Falls to Chicago. No connection. For a family of five hauling three little kids through an airport, no connection feels like the world briefly deciding to make it easier to go see the people you love. Rebecca booked it as soon as she saw it. We’ll take the omen.

Chicago meant Naperville and our friends Joe and Nicole, who are not really friends anymore. Somewhere over the years, they crossed over into family. Their kids, two and seven, absorbed our three as they’d never been apart. A perfect little crew. They don’t know they’re not cousins. Nobody told them, so they just decided to be.

Then up to their place on a lake in Wisconsin for several more days. And it was the old kind of summer. The analog kind. Swim in the pool until your fingers go soft, boat on the lake until the light gets long, hit the arcade after running down endless hallways, build a fire and make s’mores until somebody’s sticky and tired and crying a little, which is how you know the day worked. Just water and fire and a pack of kids who’d run themselves out by dark.

From there, I took the three amigos to Ann Arbor to see their biggest sister, who is off at the University of Michigan now, living the life that comes after our house. We did the aquarium and the maritime museum on Belle Isle. We did a hotel pool the way only little kids can, like it’s the greatest body of water ever filled. But mostly we just got to be near her. Three little ones orbiting their big sister, who used to be one of them and now lives two thousand miles away. I watched them pile on her. I let it run long. Some days, you don’t try to make the moment into anything. You just let the kids love who they love, and you stand close enough to see it happen.

Then down to Indianapolis. Five days at Rebecca’s mom’s, with her brother Nick, his wife Liz, and their two kids. More cousins. Real ones by blood, and just as instantly bonded as the ones in Wisconsin. Swimming in the lake at Grandma’s house. Fishing with Nick. Cheering at their cousins’ swim meets and baseball games, the kids in the stands like they’d been doing it together all their lives.

This is the part we miss, living in Idaho. We have mountains. We have a good life out west. What we don’t have is the casual, constant, down-the-street version of family. The cousins you see every Sunday. The grandmother whose house is the center of the solar system, the place where all the traditions get stored. For my kids, that doesn’t come free. It comes by airplane, rental car, and living out of a duffel bag. This has to be gone and gotten.

And here’s the part I normally don’t say. I’m not chasing it because I had it and miss it. I’m chasing it because I didn’t.

I grew up in a remote desert town in Nevada. Even our closest grandparents didn’t live down the street. They lived seventy miles down a two-lane highway, which out there is what passes for close. The other side of the family was hundreds of miles away in a different state. And the cousins, the Sunday dinners, the easy constant web of extended family… well, it just wasn’t something we did.

For a long time, I thought that was only distance. It wasn’t. My mother and my father both grew up with fathers who drank. Not my grandfathers as I’d want to remember them, but as the men my parents actually had to survive. That shapes a family. It shapes what a child decides, somewhere deep, about how close is safe. The isolation I grew up inside wasn’t an accident or just a matter of bad roads. It was imposed, on purpose, for a reason. My parents put distance between their kids and the thing that had shaped them. The long highways were partly geography and partly firewall.

They are all gone now. My grandparents, my parents, all of them in the ground. So I can say it plainly, the way you can only say things about the dead, with the anger long burned off and just the respect left. My parents broke a cycle. They didn’t get to build the lake house and the Sunday dinners and the dense warm web, because they were still doing the harder, earlier, invisible work of getting their kids clear of what they’d grown up inside. You don’t build the warm version in the first generation out. You build distance. You build safety.

You build a kid who makes it to adulthood whole enough to do the next part.

That next part is mine. And I only get to do it because they did theirs.

So when Rebecca and I pile our three kids onto a plane and chase the cousins across three states, I’m not standing taller than my parents. I’m standing on them. On their shoulders. The view I have, the porch, the chant, the kids piling on their sister, it all exists because two people a generation back decided the damage stopped with them and paid for that decision in loneliness I’ll never fully know. The first generation out gets you clear. The second generation gets you the s’mores. I didn’t earn this easy part. I inherited it from people who ate the hard part, so I wouldn’t have to.

And it’s worth every mile, because cousins are the first friends a kid doesn’t get to choose. Not siblings, who you’re stuck with. Not the friends you pick. Cousins are given. A built-in crew that teaches a kid, early and without words, that they belong to something bigger than their own house. That the family is a place you can always come back to, and there will be people there who fold you in like no time has passed. My kids are learning that in airports and lake houses. They don’t know they’re learning it. That’s how it’s supposed to go in.

On another night somewhere in there, I stood in a doorway and watched a room full of kids dance.

They were singing the little song we made up for movie nights at our house. Movie night, uh huh, uh huh. A piece of pure family nonsense, the kind every family has and forgets they have. And Joe and Nicole’s kids were singing it too. Our dumb song, in their mouths, the whole pack of them dancing around the room like it was the most important ritual in the world.

I didn’t teach them that on purpose. I couldn’t have. You can’t make the fun. You set the conditions, and the song spreads on its own, kid to kid, house to house, until somebody else’s children are singing yours.

I stood in the doorway and didn’t say anything. Just watched. Because I know how fast this goes. I know the three amigos won’t always be small enough to pile on their sister. I know the cousins will get older, busier, and harder to gather. I know the porch, the lake, and the chant won’t keep forever.

But that night they were all there. Singing the song. Dancing. Belonging to each other.

And the kid from the desert town got to stand in the doorway and see it. The kid whose parents drove out into the middle of the desert and called it enough. That kid grew up and flew two thousand miles for the rest of it, and only because they cleared the road first.

Team Uncle Nick. Movie night, uh huh.

Worth every mile. And every mile before mine.

Lead With Love,

Doom