My mom likes to text me. I don’t know if you have the same relationship with your mother, but my mother has found that texting is the easiest and quickest way to get my attention. And while she loves to ask me random questions during my week, she does a very good job of keeping me informed about my extended family: you know, those aunts, uncles, cousins… the ones you rarely see, but you know are somehow related to you (as evidenced by that large tree map someone put together years ago).

It’s often already hard to build good relationships with the people we live with, but even more difficult with family whom we rarely see. How are we supposed to be “in relationship” with people we barely know and who live so far away?