My Family - Trashier Than Footballers Wives

My mother wrote me an email, or I thought she wrote me an email - turns out it was only an email my aunt had written to my mom, which my mom then forwarded to me.
My mom has five siblings. I am an only child. So I think she likes to fill me in on the trials and tribulations of my aunts and uncles because I don't have any sibling drama of my own to deal with.

Anyhow, my Uncle was married and had three children, very nice children. My cousins are now something like ages 22, 20 and 18. He and his First Wife (very nice wife; she was great) divorced some ten years ago and she went on to marry a Much Better Guy - good for her. My uncle then impregnated and married a woman who was in her mid-twenties when he was in his early forties. She already had one child of her own, who was around seven or eight. Yeah, you do the math on that! Fine... all fine. I might have raised my eyebrows at not exactly the age difference, but the fact that when I tried to make conversation with his new wife, she proved to be incredibly dull, but I didn't think much of it.

They had a baby. A year later, they had another baby. A year after that, they had yet another baby. Meanwhile, the 2nd Wife's First Child did not even live in their house - she continued to live with 2nd Wife's parents. Why 2nd Wife continued to make new babies when she wasn't caring for her First Child, I don't know.

Next, Second Wife had an affair on Uncle and got pregnant with Other Guy's baby.
She had a meltdown, admitted that the baby she was carrying (her fifth child, at age thirty-one) was not Uncle's, and she quit her job, left the house and the three babies, ages one, two and three. Uncle continued to work, and care for the babies.

The latest email forwarded on to me from my mom states that Second Wife is back living with Uncle and still seeing Other Man. She gave birth to Other Man's Baby and Uncle cares for all FOUR babies now. Second Wife is severely depressed and watches TV all day.

This is not, I repeat, this is NOT something I saw on TV - an old rerun of a Jerry Springer episode. This is my friggin' family. It's depressing. I'm far enough from them to just watch with a kind of sickened horror, and yet... they're related to me.

Uncle owns two pieces of art that I want - they are part of a four-piece series and I have the other two pieces. They belonged to my grandparents and I'm really not sure how he got them - I think they were given to him when I was just a kid and he was decorating his first apartment or something like that. Maybe I will offer to trade him some condoms for the two pieces of art. Seems like he needs something like that...