Chopping Down The Family Tree

Between Lifetime movies this weekend I was riveted to ads for a new website called ancestry.com. With a few simple mouse clicks you can uncover your complete geneaology, slice it and dice it and roll around in it until all questions about your lineage are answered.

Well sign me up.

I'm only trying to answer one question so no matter what membership costs it's got to be worth it. Maybe they offer a 'Free Trial", which should be long enough to post my single query:

"Dear ancestry.com, Is it possible that I am not related to my oldest sister?"

A few mouse clicks and voila! Proof positive that much as I suspected she was never birthed at all, just fell from an errant planet, crawled under a rock, was later discovered and left on my parent's doorstep and accidentally brought indoors with that morning's delivery from the milk man.

No discovery would please me more, at this point.

Quite simply, my sister -- that person claiming to be my sister -- is insane. Not in the kind of way that would prevent her from functioning because she functions at high speed every day, sending emails and making phone calls and insuring that at any given moment every one of the siblings knows what the others are up to, what's going on in their lives (both real and imagined) and otherwise, as she puts it, "Keeping this family together!"

Admirable plan with one exception: The family really doesn't want to be so together and plugged in. We got enough of that whole togetherness thing trying to share one bathroom without beating each other on a daily basis growing up. I love my siblings. What I love most about them is that, like myself, they stay too busy with their own lives to devote much attention to speculation about mine.

Note that my use of the word "siblings" excludes the one who fell from a planet and was later found under a rock.

So the latest thing is this: Having spent countless hours and cell phone minutes dredging up 'the scoop' on a third cousin I only met once when I was five and we were arguing over the last cupcake at a reunion picnic, I get a phone call with news about this cousin I 'absolutely HAVE to hear', the problem being it's a quarter to twelve on a Sunday night. The only thing I want to hear is the sound of my own breathing.

I'm not a complete hot head. It takes something rather large to make me blow up. Something like an unneccessary midnight phone call. You always expect the worst from those, like Ed McMahon and the prize patrol calling to say they rang your doorbell but you didn't answer so they awarded the prize money to your neighbor, instead.

I blew. I know I called her a lot of things, beginning with 'ratchet jaw', progressing to all the conjugations of 'idiot' and only stopped at 'insensitive gossip' because my dog shot me a glance clearly communicating from her spot at my feet that now I was messing with her beauty sleep and that wasn't going to be tolerated. I value my shoes so I shut up.

There was silence at the end of the phone line. The kind of silence there had been until the phone rang at all and the kind that should have continued uninterrupted until shattered by the electronic beeping of my alarm at five a.m.

Silence, and then:

"Well Madeleine Elaine, being upset with me is SO LIKE YOU. If you had any feelings at all! But you don't! You don't care about the family and you never have!"

Pause for dramatic sigh and to inhale, then:

"You are a cold-hearted, self-centered, unfeeling ICE QUEEN and I can't believe you could be so HURTFUL. I will NEVER NEVER speak to you again!"

One more dramatic pause and then, just as she hangs up, a fervent:

"How DARE you!"

You see how having my From A Planet To A Rock theory hold true is so important.

This is the fourth time this year she has promised never to speak to me again. Unfortunately she's as good with promises as she is with meddling, which is to say not at all.

I actually look forward to these times of being 'forever disowned', as she puts it. True, I fall out of the information loop and have no idea what second and third cousins, siblings and great aunts are up to, but at least when the phone rings past eleven at night I rest assured knowing it's just Ed McMahon and the Prize Patrol calling to wish me better luck next time.