Over the past week, I’ve been spending a lot of time with my cousin’s three daughters Halia (14), Kaiena (11), and Naleia (7). They live in Michigan so I usually never get to see them, but now that I have some time to spare I’ve finally been able to hang out with them while they are visiting. It has truly been a blast to say the least!

Just for some context, I have always been the baby on both sides of my extended family. Every single one of my 16 cousins is older than me, and the oldest is almost my mom’s age! Suffice it to say that my experiences at family gatherings have been just a wee bit unbalanced. I never really knew what it was like to entertain (and be entertained by) family members so much younger than me. Especially as an only child, I was mostly used to entertaining myself.

As I write this, I’m starting to realize it’s pretty difficult to talk intelligently about the impact this past week has had on me. Maybe that’s indicative of the gap between rational discourse and feelings. When I normally talk about ideas, I am able to structure them logically and pull relevant information from specific places when I need them for support. Words constitute the medium that most effectively transmits ideas, so blogging works perfectly well.

However, this past week (along with many other events that have happened within the past year) strongly highlighted the importance of feeling in addition to rational discourse. In order to merely keep up with the storm of actions going on with these three sisters around I simply couldn’t rely on my normal, methodical thought processes. Engaging fruitfully in whatever was going on worked better when I just relaxed and went with the flow instead of thinking too much. Being able to think rationally is obviously important, but it by no means constitutes the entire human experience.

I’ll just take the story behind the cover picture of Naleia and me as an example. I just found out today that Naleia’s nickname “Birdy” became a thing because “Nene” was originally a shortened version of her name.  Eventually, they started calling her “Nene Bird” because that is the official state bird of Hawaii (this side of my family has roots in Hawaii). Finally, that was just shortened to “Birdy” or “Bird,” which seems to work for her.

Objectively, she wasn’t actually trying to make my head into a nest. She was just playing with my hair and eventually decided to drape a nearby blanket over my head. This “beautiful machine” (her words) was supposed to make me pretty after she deliberately tousled my hair with her hands and the blanket. After a few rounds of doing that, she admitted mischievously “Oh wait, this is actually the ugly machine!”

Man, that just about killed me in the best way possible.

So even though birdy wasn’t literally making my head into a nest, I want to put forward an image to more or less sum up my time with all three of the girls. Nests are symbolic of a comfortable home that is suitable for raising kids and helping them grow. It involves family, love, and security. My ties to them could theoretically be broken at any moment because there are no truly objective reasons for me to always be there for them. Families break up for any number of reasons and there are plenty of stereotypes about families that don’t get along.

From my perspective after these experiences with them, I want to be there for them because I fell in love with them. They are family and I want to be there how I can to help them grow into amazing human beings. Right now, they are energetic bundles of potential (Halia maybe not so much because she doesn’t get enough sleep and is always tired… dat teenage life) that will be manifested in response to all of their life experiences, which are beyond anybody’s full control. So in that sense, the girls turned my head into a nest that I hope to use to help nurture their growth into beautiful young women.