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Families living in this transitory and very mobile age know they have to make special efforts to keep in touch. Cellular phones, e-mail, snail mail, computer-generated phones are all part of the battery of weapons that help friends and loved ones stay in touch. Kids go away to college, join the service, marry and move. Cousins and siblings who were close find themselves spread out from Maine to California and Mexico to Minnesota.
While one-on-one communications can still take place, and that helps keep relationships alive though often at some expense and certainly with limits, between the rare family reunion at holiday time or on summer vacations. But the dynamic that flourishes in a group of folks, especially of mixed generations is hard to achieve by mail, phone and cyber space—though not impossible.
Granted, conference telephone calls can be arranged, linking several family members all over the map, often at great expense. I know a group of siblings who needed to discuss a parent’s long-term care. With each of them at a great distance from the others, a conference call was set up and had to fill the bill. But the bill they were left with was phenomenal. Such a crisis demands unusual expenditures, though, and should always be an option.
Mail and the Internet, however, provide options we never had before. And just in time, too. Statistics show that it is a rare extended family that does not have one branch living out-of-state. Gone are the days when you could walk to Grandma’s, with a rest stop at Aunt Sue’s and a trip to Uncle Harry’s on the way home, all by foot! Chances are now Grandma has retired to Arizona, Aunt Sue is chopping wood in Wisconsin and Uncle Harry is lounging in a beach chair in Hawaii!
How are families overcoming long distances to stay in touch in meaningful ways—and that means more than “Hi, how are you? Everybody feeling okay? Good. See ya!”
To begin with, they’re using the mail in an old-fashioned but unique way. One group I know has a few members with a flair for creativity. They came up with the idea of a monthly family newsletter focused on a particular theme. The “news” in the letter, however, is not necessarily about what the vet said about Aunt Sue’s dog's arthritis, or how Harry’s new car is running. Instead, they gang of cousins and siblings takes turns (for a year at a time) choosing monthly topics and asks everyone in the clan to cooperate by sending a short article, story, essay, letter, picture, drawing, poem or memory to the “editor” by a deadline date.
The “editor,” who is usually someone who has easy access to an office copying machine, assembles all the materials, cuts and pastes it on two sides of several sheets, copies, and mails the copies off the members of the family Presto! A monthly newsletter.
When my friend Trish told me about her gang’s way of staying in touch I was incredulous. How do you get them to do it, I asked. She explained that that was tricky in the beginning, and it’s always understood that no one MUST send something in. You volunteer, no one can volunteer you. Also, the topic must be a non-threatening one, so that those who want to keep it simple, can, and those who want to embroider or go deeper, can do as well.
The more literary among them can embellish or dramatize. The very young can draw pictures to express their thoughts. And if someone just won’t submit a piece of their own creation, they are welcome to clip a short article or poem from someplace else and send it as an offering instead, giving credits, of course.
They now have a kind of personal, family magazine. One topic that worked really well was “Cars—What’s my special memory or dream of a car?” Grandma probably wrote about the time Grandpa proposed in the front seat of his Model T, Uncle Harry no doubt waxed poetic about his first convertible instead of going off onto a sermon about the evils of today's youth, and Aunt Sue may have copied a photo from her album of herself and her mom and dad in an ancient Packard back in 1929. As I recall, Trish said one of the teen-agers wrote about what his dream car of the future would look like, and her husband reminisced about his classic Chevy Malibu. A couple of the children drew cars they imagined of the future, and a whole newsletter was born.
The youngsters learned about traditions and the older days, and the older folks learned about the dreams and hopes of the kids and those in between learned it all.
Other topics family groups can use include: Holiday recipe exchanges; ”Most unusual food ever tried or that I imagine trying”; ”Favorite singers and why,” and, when they get more comfortable with each other, “Tell about your first kiss”! Families who use this newsletter process will discover they’re learning more about each other than they would have through simple relaying of information. You get to see inside a person’s heart, when they share memories, hopes and dreams. And every generation has some to share.
Cyber communications also make it a lot easier to stay in touch. Extended families or a group of friends can register as an E-group at “E-Groups” or other online linking services. In essence, when you post an e-mail to your formed e-group, you’re posting to everyone on the list. In effect, you have a chat room situation, and can even establish ground rules, such as, “such-and-so-topic will be the headline for Sunday talks.” Then all posts on that day will revolve around the topic the group or its selected leader has chosen. Using digital photos to enhance, the topic, or keep the linkers updated on children's growth and other progress can be great fun, too!
This works well in a group where the entire membership, or at least every household, is equipped with online service, often a problem, if several older folks are part of the group, though more of them are getting online these days.
Another way to share online and not leave out the non-Internetted is to create a round-robin newsletter, which, when complete with all possible e-mail entries, is then copied and mailed to the non-e-mail participants. This is not a complete solution, however, since a way would have to be found for the non-computerized to furnish the group with their news or monthly “writing.”
But creativity is the password in communications these days, as is linking people of like minds and interests. One interest family members have is each other. We want to stay in touch, because first, we know how neat it is to hear from the rest of those who love us and praise us, and second, we can add so much to the days of those missing us, too. Starting a family link-up, of whatever sort, might be the best present you ever offer your own particular crowd.
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