Surprise guests

To my surprise my mother said she was coming to visit in February, with my sister. My mum didn’t want to travel alone, after being seriously ill on an airplane, and Jayne didn’t want to travel alone either with her son, now 16 months old. I felt excited yet somewhat nervous, after last years run-in with my mother-in-law and my family I wasn’t sure how it would go. We hardly knew our one and only English cousin, Brayden, and I was unsure how he would fit in with my unruly and over-active trio.

My mum seemed happy to be in KL and with us. Jayne was battling with the west-east jet-lag and having a young child awake most of the night, but once she got over that she liked it. Our children absolutely adored Brayden, fussing over him and playing with him and there seemed to be a good bond between Gabriel and Brayden already. I have always been so grateful for the easy friendship between the French cousins (Marc and Francois & Nina and Manon). Later on realized it was not automatic or guaranteed. As more cousins popped out on the French side, now twelve in total including our children, the inter-cousins relations were not always warm and could even get aggressive or nasty. So we were happy Gabriel had found a friend and encouraged it.

But I found myself feeling jealous of the way Brayden ran to my mum, while my kids looked on, thinking how just a few years ago they had been the ones to cuddle up to her. I was having problems adjusting to my sister with a child and listening to her ‘first-time mother’ moans irked me since I was doing everything in threes these days and no one seemed bothered anymore. It felt like a lot of time had passed since I was in the same boat. Like when Jayne first fell in love with her husband-to-be - I had been married for five years, and I felt so old and boring. Now I felt I was on the way out of having young babies and toddlers, while she was just starting...