20181210 - Monday - Adrian’s birthday - Fay Berry

20181210- Monday- Adrian’s birthday

Today is Adrian Dangerfield’s birthday. Adrian isn’t on facebook, so I suggest that anyone who has Carol’s email address, email her to wish Adrian a happy birthday.

Adrian is my 2nd cousin and I am very fond of him.

I have lots of Dangerfield cousins in Adelaide but I didn’t “seem” to have any cousins at all in Adelaide in all my early years.

The reason was that both my parents came from Pinnaroo up in the Murray Mallee.

My Mum attended a Protestant church at Pinnaroo and my Dad was from a poor Catholic family.

In those days there was a lot of animosity between Protestants and Catholics, so neither family was pleased with the possibility of the two families being “united.”

My grandmother was dying at that time and so she tried to extract a “death bed promise” from my mother, not to marry her Catholic boyfriend.

My. Grandpa Williams, thankfully, refused to let Grandma extract her “death-bed promise” from my Mum.

My Dad’s father, however, was even more specific.

IF my Dad married my Mum he would be “cut off” from the family.

The practicality of this was that Grandpa refused to pay my father for work they had done on building roads in Pinnaroo.

This was the money Dad planned to use for marrying Mum.

Work was very hard to get in Pinnaroo at the time and so Mum and Dad decided that they would leave Pinnaroo to marry and hopefully find work there as well.

Some time after Grandma’s death, Mum and Dad, influenced by Grandma’s Christadelphian beliefs, also became Christadelphian and began attending the Adelaide ecclesia.

But Dad was very upset by the Dangerfield’s rejection of him as a husband for Mum, and so he held quite a lot of angst against “Dangerfield’s” in general.

So we kids, as we came along, were completely unaware that we had a whole bevy of cousins in the Adelaide meeting, people such as the Gore’s, the Dangerfield’s and sundry other rellies.

We THOUGHT that all of Mum and Dad’s FRIENDS were our REAL Aunties and Uncles.

When we found out that they were NOT we reacted rather violently.

We stopped calling our “adopted” family “Aunty” and “Uncle” and went into a “blue funk.”

I was particularly disappointed that I now had NO Aunties and Uncles in Adelaide.

I was around about 18 years of age before I found out that the Dangerfield’s were my rellies, my REAL rellies!

I remember being at a kitchen evening and Roger G asked me up for one of the games.

And he was SO NICE and he was my real COUSIN!

So suddenly I had many relatives.

But because of the years of separation that had occurred between us, I was never able to recover the BONDING that would/could/should have occurred between us.

I could have grown up close friends with Maureen D or Ruth D and many others.

Today, I watch the Gore family interactions and the closeness of all the cousins and see how beautiful it is to grow up with cousins.

So my advice to anyone in a family situation who for some reason or other has a “falling out” with their close relatives, GET OVER IT!

Don’t let such things prevent YOUR CHILDREN from establishing loving relationships with their cousins.

BONDING is precious.

LOVE is precious and needs to be established early.

BONDING, once broken, it is very hard to heal.

So back to my cousin ADRIAN.

Please remember Adrian’s birthday today, and since he is not on facebook, please email or message Carol and wish him a HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

And now my diet for yesterday

Saturday 8th Dec 29181 30 am at 6.5 sugar level