A day where I find I have to try and keep my mouth tightly zipped.

Not against anything that the larger public would be aware of, just against my own family drama. You have your own, whether blood or chosen family, we all end up in the ditch on occasion. Oh, and this isn't immediate family, in this case it's far distant cousins.

I explain my family like this. It's not that we're a particularly large family, we're actually fairly small as these things go. The difference is that each of the generations all live close and grew up together, so even six generations along we can all tell far too much about each other's business.

This can be difficult when someone goes through the sh*t. Which one of my cousins is doing at the moment. What they're suffering shouldn't happen to anybody, but it's just one of those things.

What makes it worse is the fact that there's a built in audience in the family observational circle. Having a sh*tty time of things is bad enough; having half your extended family breathing down your neck while it happens just makes it ten times worse.

My own part in this has been limited to going "Oh, man that sucks..." and "I just can't believe it..." on the occasions where we've been back home. I keep my nose out of that stuff, a habit I learned long ago.

And I'm not about to throw it away, even if there are more currents to this story than I was otherwise aware of to date (keep my nose out of it, remember?). But sometimes things come to a head, and there's no avoiding it. Mostly because certain precipitating events involve events available for all to see.

I'm still doing things like "oh that sucks" and "I can't believe it" though. Just now with even more of a sense of "stay the hell out of this kind of stuff".

And yeah, I once had my best friend describe my family life by saying "if mickie isn't in the loony bin, none of the rest of us have any excuses". I'm still occasionally surprised by the times when that offhand observation are proven true.