Wonderful, Horrible, Difficult, and Complicated

The Pens are thrilled to welcome Avon author Lavinia Kent today!

Family is complicated.

I almost feel that I could stop writing after that one sentence and I'd be done, that everyone who reads this would nod and feel satisfied.

It's so complicated that I've written three completely different versions of this piece, each one focused on something different. I began the first one by describing this last Christmas at my parent's house in Wisconsin. I was there with my husband and three children. Also present were my two brothers and their wives, another four grandchildren and my uncle. My parent's house is not small, but it is far from large. Most of the adults escaped to a nearby motel for the nights (ahh, hot tub and pool first thing in the morning), but we were all together during the day.

As was expected it was both a wonderful and difficult time. For every hour spent listening to seven children arguing over the Wii there was an hour spent watching a massive snowball fight through the window, bright red cheeks and endless smiles (hopefully I will have managed to download my pictures). For every time I watched my brother and husband carefully avoid talking about politics I spent time talking with my mother, learning bits and pieces of family history.

It was wonderful and difficult.

It was complicated.

It was family.

The second time I tried to write I worked on a piece tying in family history and shamelessly pushing my latest book, Taken by Desire. It was not a far stretch because many parts of my heroine's background were rooted in my own family's New England history. My heroine is an English woman, but her immense fortune has American roots - and problems.

I grew up visiting some of my family's grand homes in Bristol, Rhode Island and hearing the stories of their fascinating lives. I felt I was living a real piece of history as I imagined myself dressed in a late Victorian gown, playing croquet on the lawns. I loved to imagine them in their carriages driving about the small town on the same streets that I walked as a child. I climbed the narrow ladders to the widow's walk and dreamed of looking out over the bay waiting for my true love to return.

It was only as an adult that I truly came to understand what it meant that my distant relatives had been shippers in the triangle trade and how one-sided my dreams had been.

Family is complicated - a single generation can separate a great man from a slave trader.

To switch to a much happier subject, the topic of my last blog attempt was weddings. My mother gave me a wonderful selection of family wedding photographs as a Christmas gift. And last weekend I attended a wedding where the bride glowed so brightly, it made everybody smile. I always need to be reminded that brides truly glow. It is such a trite expression; yet when I look at some couples on their wedding days, I can barely breathe because the love is so plain to see.

I write about such love all the time, and sometimes begin to think I am exaggerating - but then I see in palpable form that most basic bond, the foundation of most families, and find I lack the words to do it justice.

I've seen the same glow on new parents, and when a loved one survives an accident or a health scare. It isn't often that love shines out of someone, but when it does, it's unmistakable, and almost always a mark of family feeling.

What ties all these different attempts at a blog together is, of course, family - wonderful, horrible, difficult, and complicated. Families haves their stories and history, their annoyances and their companionable moments. But to be a true family, what ties us all together is love. Sometimes what's trite is still true.


Lavinia Kent is the author of three regency historicals from Avon, and lives with her family in Washington D.C.