conjunction junction, what's your function?
Here's what I think: I think that family get togethers are a way for us to reintroduce ourselves, to say "look, this is me, as I and sometimes you think I see me." I am the youngest in my family- it is both a privileged but oddly curtailed kind of space to take up. Can you be confrontational (as the youngest)? Yes, if it's something everyone can tell a story about in five years. Also yes, if you say it while smiling and giving off your usual charming aura. Are you sometimes the one everyone feels "most comfortable with"? Here's why: they feel that way because you are the sum of and look for distractions from this fact-- we are all, really and truly, related to each other. We see each other in eyebrow hairs and ways of chewing. We see one very, big, sometimes nasty, many-limbed self. It's best to blur the edges of it somewhat, and, in this strange time before my status as the youngest will be no longer, I'm happy, though maybe a little tired of, being the one who says "look over there! here now!".