Family reunion 2026

My crew, one half of the House of Gloria 

One month later. I am only now able to write about the absolutely fantastic time we had at our family reunion in Jamaica in mid July. I think I couldn't post about it before because I knew there would be no way to really do it justice. We flew in from all over to join our relatives in Jamaica, seventy five of us all told, staying in villas at Silver Sands on the north coast, smaller family groups sharing the rental of each house, with all the groups coming together each day and evening for reunion activities at the beach bar and open air patio adjacent to the swimming beach. It was perfect. My niece Leisa planned the whole thing over the course of the past year and she pulled off a deeply restorative and joyful event for all of us.  

The first night we had a big group dinner and greeted family we hadn’t seen in years, met all the new generations we didn't already know, and introduced our tribes anew, each “house” representing one of the original nine Stiebel siblings. My mom’s offspring, the House of Gloria, showed up in force, with all my kids and my brother and all but one of his kids and all our loves there with us. We all stayed together in a sprawling beachside villa called Tallawah, fourteen of us in all in a beautiful sea breeze swept place, plus my cousin Carla and her wife Jackie, all the way from San Francisco, who as lone representatives of the House of Beulah, folded in with us. House of Donald and House of Maisy were almost fully represented as well, and House of Percy and house of Terrence had strong contingents too. House of Winifred had a decent turnout, but House of Grace had only one member present, due to some sadness I won’t get into. Only the House of Fay was unrepresented. We missed the ones who couldn’t make it, and kept them close to heart. (None of this attendance tally will mean anything to anyone reading here; this is really for my own record.)

Day 2 we did multigenerational Survivor games on the beach in the morning and karaoke in the evening. Day 3 we went rafting on the Martha Brae river and had a white party with a DJ and danced under the stars till the wee hours, with exuberant conga lines and the like. Two other family groups were also doing reunions at Silver Sands and we ended up mixing festivities with a lovely camaraderie. Day 4 we lounged in the morning at our various villas and then gathered at our house in the afternoon to watch the World Cup soccer final (Spain over Argentina all the way!) before dispersing to dress for the final night’s group dinner at the beach club. We all departed the next morning, with Leisa, Grant, and little Harper traveling back to New York City with us to meet the truck with all their belongings that had driven from Dallas while they were at the reunion. They have now officially moved to the city and are ensconced in their new digs in Brooklyn.

Since words can't really capture how magical the whole experience of being together was, especially (for me) watching the younger generations of us bond and carry on the warm familial relationships our parents instilled in us as paramount to nurture, even down to little Harper with her little cousins, all the children racing around among the grown ups, the way I remember doing with my cousins when I was a child myself, since I can't truly evoke how that fed my very soul, I'll just put up some more pictures, in no particular order, and let them hold this space instead. 

What we saw when we walked into the house where we stayed.

Fifteen of us ate our meals together poolside.

Where we swam.

The beach was right there.

Survivor games, green team!

My brother with his daughters and granddaughter.

Cousins

Days before their second anniversary

Me in paradise (with an incipient sunburn)

Harper with one of her many doting aunties

Night of the white party, a time was had!

Sharing the last breakfast muffin

The House of Gloria

Little lifeguard

Survivor games, blue team!

Survivor red team (he was the youngest at our last reunion).

 

Survivor games, yellow team flag bearer!

Cousins

It was his birthday!

 

White party beauties

Cousins

My berry girl and me.

Seventy-five Stiebels strong

Randoms

Another of my daughter's Day One crew, known since first grade as "The Six," got married in June. That's four of them hitched, now. My girl, here with her forever date, was resplendent in red.

I did the magazine's cover story for its "America at 250" special issue. I don't think they could have chosen a better cover subject to illustrate this moment. She dropped some wisdom, too.

Still living the puzzle life over here.

The rest of the photos in this post are from the July Fourth cookout that my daughter's in-laws hold every year. My son in law is born on that day and so is one of his cousins, so it's more a double birthday party than anything else. More and more of our side of the family joins the festivities every year, though my son had to work this year. He picked up a side job doing crowd control at a World Cup watch party at Brooklyn Bridge park, not a bad overtime gig if the crowd stays controlled, which it mostly did.

My beautiful girl, the wide blue sky, and me.

The birthday boy and his mama got the dancing started.

My lovely bonus children. 

Aren't they adorable? I swiped that last photo from one of my nieces' posts on Insta. The beaming couple is weeks away from celebrating their second anniversary. We're headed to Jamaica on July 17 for a family reunion, my mother's side of the family, the offspring of the nine Stiebel siblings, all of them gone now, but hoards of their offspring still kicking. These two plan to to stay a few days longer at an all-inclusive resort on the island to celebrate year two. Love that for them!

Oops, had this in drafts and never pressed publish.

 

Sunday again

Meant to post this on Father's Day, along with a carousel of photos of our dude who abides. That's his resting bitch face, but don't be fooled. He's not fierce, really. He's a boy dad and a girl dad and his boy calls him "Yo Pops" and his girl calls him "Papa Bear," and they both have his number. We'll have been married 40 years this summer, where did the time go? So much love for the man who's done this parent walk with me, beautifully.

It's Friday night at twilight as I write this, a hard hour for me. Since I was a little girl, I get restless, lonely, especially if I’m inside the house as the light starts to fade. I need to be outside at the in-between time, the spacious sky overhead, wide air in every direction. Otherwise I feel as if I in the wrong place, the wrong body, in the wrong time, as if I’m supposed to have done something more with this one precious life but I missed the turn. Tonight I’m thinking I have no friends I can call and say let’s go sit outside and talk or not talk. Everyone is always busy. Or just not up for being spontaneous. And for some reason it doesn’t feel quite the same to go sit outside alone. It’s lonely. I feel the void keenly. 

Another day. Sunday now. I’m done writing and editing for today so now I’m here with myself again. The man is watching World Cup Football in the living room. I’m in the back room contemplating the fact that being a mother to grown children means not calling them when the impulse strikes, knowing they’re out living their lives, as you once did, and you’d just be interrupting their flow. Wait for them to call you. It’s okay to miss them and feel sorry for yourself while you wait, as long as you never guilt them with it, because this is just life as it ever has been. How well I understand my own mother now. 

I read something this morning in a piece titled “How To Be Old” by Roger Rosenblatt in the NY Times. It said never ask others to share your despair. It’s simply not fair. I get that. It’s amorphous and existential anyway, so how do you even explain it? It’s just a state of being that arrived bit by bit as you aged and now it travels with you, a part of you, a melancholic nostalgic yearning for what is past, and will never again be, and how fleeting it was in the end. This is why I am endeavoring not to distract my children from one moment of the days they are living now. How much more despairing I’d be if I didn’t have those days to miss, to yearn for again. I had them once. There is that. 

Melancholic nostalgic yearning. All three together. And somehow not redundant. This is how it feels on Sundays before the light starts to fade. Maybe I’ll go lose myself in another episode of Blue Lights. It's a police procedural set in Belfast, plays on BritBox. I find it riveting.

Wrote this a week ago, while my blog was private. Now it's public again. I can't decide what I'm doing here, it seems.

Tiptoeing back into the fold

I’ve been so unmotivated to bare heart and soul here. I worry that anything I write can be used against me if things take even worse turns, because let’s face it, there’s very little daylight between what’s happening here and what happened a century ago in another place, as we’ve read and seen the memoirs, novels, documentaries, films, and histories of that “never again” darkness that has come again. Things get quiet sometimes, because the once-incisive press has largely been silenced. We still get a facsimile of the news 24/7, but the true horrors unfolding for some people, those stories are hidden, ignored, or go unreported. We glimpse the tip of the terror when it bubbles over, before it’s suppressed again, and the news cycle moves on, the zone gets flooded, and we don’t know where to put our attention. So I don’t know how to write here anymore. This place used to be where I could play. And process my crazy. And whine and opine to my heart's content. Now it is where I could wittingly or unwittingly burn everything down. 

Melodramatic much?

But is seems I’ve been reawakened by the wave of euphoria that swept through my city these last few weeks. The Knicks parade is today. My kids and their loves are already out there this morning, lining up to cheer for the national champions. And I’m here, attempting to record, at least pictorially, some of what I would have posted about if I hadn’t been too numbed out from trying to get through the news cycles, as surface level as they are, these past several weeks. I’ve had my head down working too—I just delivered the first two thirds of the book I’m editing, and am now on the final lap there. I'm working with another lovely subject, I am so fortunate, really, in who I've been able to partner with on these projects. I'm working with a man this time, an actor with an unprotected heart, which makes me love him; the ones who feel the world too deeply, they are my tribe. 

My previous book is also going through the production stages at the publisher, so there’s still periodic work coming through for that—I had to write a new epilogue, for example, due to a recent exciting and audacious development in my subject’s life, plus there's the copyedit read, the legal read, first pass pages, cover and interior designs, the whole nine. I also got asked to profile a subject for the cover of a magazine, which frankly had me hyperventilating, I had only a week to do the interview and write the story, I feared I wouldn't do the person justice, but that’s done and delivered now, and the subject and the editors were happy, so I'm breathing normally again. 

Let's see, since last I posted:

1. We celebrated Mother's Day with brunch at my daughter’s place in Brooklyn. The usual suspects came. My daughter’s husband made the most beautiful bouquets for his mom and me. It included all my favorite flowers, orchids, ranunculus, and tulips. Swoon.

2. This darling little one turned three years old at the end of May! And at the end of July, she and her lovely parents will officially have relocated from Dallas, Texas, and be living in Brooklyn, New York. She's enrolled in school, their new apartment lease is signed and they get the keys on July 22.

3. I completed the refresh of the back bedroom of our apartment, which involved finally pulling up the 25-year-old carpet in there, and laying new floors. I also had the broken blinds replaced, the walls spackled and painted anew, and my girl and I got rid of ten garbage bags worth of stuff from the bookshelves alone (my kids took things of theirs they wanted to keep to their homes). On my birthday my daughter and I chose a new rug to go in there, which I absolutely love. I work in that room a lot now, sitting in the recliner with my laptop, and then coming down and feeling that soft plush rug under my feet. At first, my daughter was saying I needed to get new shelves and beds, and even new bedding but I disagree. Now that the bookshelves are vastly less burdened, I'm perfectly happy with my mother's former bed with it's old timey romanticism, and my daughter's childhood wrought iron trundle bed, they both hold very fine memories. Here's a picture but it doesn't really capture the serene feel of the room or the gentle quality of the light in there. 

Now all I have left in this room-by-room house refresh that I embarked on five years ago is our master bedroom. I have no idea how to start!

4. And this just in! The kids just texted the group chat this pic from the Knicks victory celebration parade this morning. More than one million people are out there, many of them having lined up before daybreak. Go Knicks! What a time to be a New Yorker!

Collective Effervescence

I cannot tell you how much joy washed over my city as we watched our Knicks basketball team march to the championship win last Saturday night. Watch parties all over the city, in restaurants and bars, on sidewalks and in parks, on rooftops and in backyards and living rooms, block party cookouts with everyone invited, music blaring, people dancing, everyone sharing in the same euphoria, differences erased, and in between games, we met each other as members of one tribe, regardless of outward appearance, background, circumstance, we shared this beautiful possibility, with our wonderful young mayor as the cheerleader in chief, reminding us that we are indeed one, all of us making up the whole magical idea that is New York City. God, we needed this joy. We needed to come together like this. We needed to remember that, as one Luis Jonathan Hernandez put it in a post on instagram, "Joy is not a break from the work. Joy is the work."

"When a system wants you defeated," Hernandez wrote, "your joy becomes a problem for that system. A people who can still gather, still feast, still dance in the streets, still love each other out loud, is a people that has not be conquered. That is why joy is resistance. Not only because it feels good, though God knows it does. Because it is proof. Proof that we are still here, still together, still ungovernable by their fear."

It was incandescent, what New Yorkers experienced en masse as we watched Jalen Brunson, Karl Anthony Towns, OG Anunoby, Josh Hart, and all the rest never give up, even when the situation looked hopeless, watched them be mentally tough enough to scrap their way to victory, coming back from a 29-point deficit in one game to win by one point with one second to go! New York just about fell ouuuut! Good God it was magnificent! The whole city roared! 

Apparently, there's a name for what just happened here. It's called Collective Effervescence. Here's the science, from sociologist Emile Durkheim, as explained by a trauma therapist named Susan Zinn on social media—I'm quoting her because she explains it better than I can right now—"When thousands of people feel the same emotion at the same time—joy, hope, belonging—something extraordinary happens inside your body. Your heart rhythms synchronize with strangers. Your nervous system wakes up. You feel alive in a way you forgot was possible. Sociologist Émile Durkheim named this in 1912. He noticed that humans are fundamentally transformed when they gather around something larger than themselves. A ritual. A belief. A shared purpose."

She points out that New Yorkers haven't had a Knicks championship win since 1973, and now, it's happened. "Fifty-three years of waiting. And then—the thaw. Most of us have been living in Functional Freeze. Functioning perfectly and managing everything, and feeling almost nothing. Last night, New York reminded us what we’ve been starving for."

The Man

May 3 was my birthday

I'm finding that my word smithing work steals my mojo for other writing, so that I tell you all my news in my head, but can't seem to get any words onto the page here. But yes, I had a birthday. 

I spent the day roaming with my beautiful daughter. We went to the at the movies (The Devil Wears Prada 2—we have a cute history with the original installment from her growing up years) and then lunch at our fave spot, and then home to plan a refresh of her former bedroom, browsing online to choose a rug and paint colors, drawing different furniture arrangements, taking measurements, with the two of us intermittently flopping side by side onto the bed to debrief on life things, laughing, being completely in the flow, and it was just a divine time. She had been at a friend's bachelorette party in New England since Thursday, one of The Six (friends since elementary school) is getting married this summer, while another of their number will have a baby in the fall, so she was feeling all filled up with the beauty and complexity and serendipity of love and life. She came straight here from her train ride back from New England with her suitcase in tow to spend the day with me. She went home to her husband later that evening. My own husband was around all day, but he graciously stayed in the background reading, knowing unstructured time spent with my girl was my birthday gift this year, and it was the sweetest.

The nieces and my girl and her love are coming over tomorrow night for a Survivor watch party and to cut cake with me, so we'll do my actual birthday celebration then. My son and his wife won't be here. She has to teach a class and he just went back to work from medical leave. His got burned on the job, flames swooped over his ears—yes, I know!—and he was off for four to eight weeks as he healed. He healed very fast thank heavens, four weeks in you couldn't tell he'd been burned, his ears looked completely back to normal, and he was cleared to return to duty. But since he just got back, it's too soon to be asking folks to switch shifts with him. He says he and his love will do something else to celebrate with me when he's free. Meanwhile my girl stuck two candles in a Jamaican plantain tart and she and her dad sang me happy birthday. I'm wearing the amethyst earring my man gave me as a gift. He knows I love my mother's birth stone.

As I type, two men are in the back room of my house pulling up the grody carpet and patching up the walls in preparation to paint and lay floors in there. And then it will be just my bedroom left to refresh in this years-long redo of my home, which I contemplated for more than a decade before finally getting started with the kitchen in 2022. Four years later, I'm closing in on the finish line. I feel completely overmatched when I consider taking on our bedroom, but this is a conundrum for another day.

I also meant to post about the man and I going to the New York Botanical Gardens Orchid Show a couple weeks ago. I walked and walked with no issues at all. At one point we came to some stairs and from force of habit my husband said, "The ramp is over there—oh, you're up the stairs already!" And I was. I use my cane for stairs because I still have bum knees, but with the cane, they don't hurt at all going up, and I can lead off strongly with my newly fixed left leg, too. This counts as big excitement for me nowadays. Here are some pictures, and look, I made a post!