I spent the first 10 years of my life living on the outskirts of a city of about 100,000 people. My home was a tiny wood and mud house consisting of one room and a kitchen, and one wall was attached to another tiny house also consisting of a room and a kitchen. In the first house I lived with my parents and in the other lived my paternal grandfather and my step-grandmother. My parents both had to work so my step-grandmother watched over me quite a bit. I spent time with my paternal grandfater going on his long bicycle rides and hikes. My paternal uncle lived in town and was a regular visitor, and I was a regular visitor to their residence as well. My mother had an older brother and a younger brother. The older brother moved to Denmark when i was very young, leaving his wife behind, and she was a frequent, morose visitor with whom my mother commisserated over her loneliness and fear of abandonment. The younger brother was troubled from an early age and made only a few appearances, so I didn't know him well. My mother's parents lived on a small subsistence farm in a nearby village and we sometimes visited them, but my maternal grandmother died when I was five years old and there was lots of bitter feeling between my mother and her father, so we didn't go to the farm all that often after my grandmother's death, and as far as I remember the grandfather never visited us. My mother's older brother had a daughter and a son I saw occasionally in the summers, and my father's brother had a daughter several years older than me with whom I didn't have much contact because of the sensitive age difference. The house was on a small cul-de-sac and there were neighboring children of various ages, and we all played together in the mud of the cul-de-sac, which wasn't paved.
In June 1975, one week after my 10th birthday, I moved to Canada. For a while we had contact with my godmother and her second husband and her daughter and the daughter's husband, but we had no relatives in Canada. My parents strictly controlled my contact with any family overseas and my relationships with them lapsed. My mother's younger brother moved to Canada too but skipped on his job before getting citizenship and died in 1994 at age 42, still an illegal alien. I remember spending entire summer days with him just keeping him company as he did under-the-table jack-of-all-trades jobs for which he sometimes never got paid because he had no legal recourse. My mother's older brother visited once and my father's brother also visited once. My brother was born in July 1976, and he accompanied my mother to the old country once, while my father flew there twice. After we fell out of touch with the godmother and her family and my mother's younger brother died, my only contact was pretty much only with my parents and brother.
My mother died in November 2011, at age 69. Since then there's been only my father and brother. All of my grandparents are also dead and so are my father's brother and his wife, while their daughter is in a mental institution overseas. My mother's older brother has a thriving but fractious family because his children don't like him much. He phones my father from time to time but I avoid talking to him if I can.
Long story short, I consider myself to have no family other than my father and brother, and in general have no ONE except them. Since I live with my father and brother, every day is pretty much the same as any other day. Last week my brother's birthday came around and all three of us totally forgot about it until late evening. My father and I apologized to my brother but he said it had been his preference not to celebrate it. On one of our birthdays we normally do very little, just buy the celebrant a dinner of his choice and his favorite cake, no candles. Other holidays such as Christmas we haven't celebrated for decades.
Hope that wasn't too much of a wall of text.
