Life is short, you never know how long you will have with people your loved ones. This fact seems to elude so many people and I find it sad. I count myself as lucky in the fact that my family has always been fairly close but even in my close family we have people that have made choices that I don’t understand.

I have an aunt that doesn’t speak to any of us. My kids don’t remember her and we rarely talk about her so really they forget she exists. She was one of the first people to see the boys when they were born and love them. She was so excited to hear that I was having twins. To have her just disappeared from their lives and my life breaks my heart over and over again. How does one make that choice? It’s not a choice I could ever make. No hurt or anger could make me choose that my family isn’t my family.

It’s inevitable when dealing with people that feelings will get hurt from time to time. When family is involved the cuts tend to be that much deeper. There have been plenty of times where I have had to say, “Yes my feelings were hurt, yes I needed cooling off time” so I get that. However, letting it go for months or years on end is silly and childish. Once you get to a certain point fixing the issues becomes almost impossible if you wait too long to address it.

At times I feel like people just need to suck it up and tell the others involved they are sorry. Saying your sorry doesn’t make you weak, it makes you a stronger, better person. More often than not it actually is just as much a situation of, I recognize your feelings were hurt, so were mine, now what do we do to get back on track.

I hope that my kids are learning to say their sorry and mean it so that this cycle doesn’t continue. I hope that my siblings and I have learned something from our parents and that we forgive and move on more and that we are never divided because we are too stubborn to say “I’m sorry”.