Y’all acting like y’all don’t know how it is with family. Sometimes it’s best to keep the peace by distancing yourself from some family members. Don’t send them birthday cards, Christmas cards and don’t invite them to your wedding because then some family members will know where you live and that you’re still alive. That’s how the cookie crumbles.
I know this has been talked to death here, but I'd just like to add to this that the distancing could have begun long before Meghan had a say in anything. For reasons that have nothing to do with her. At least some of us it must have; for that uncle not to have had contact with her for 20 years means something broke down before she was an adult.
When your parents become distant from family, you just don't get to really know that family in a meaningful way.
But it's also important to recognize that a family growing distant doesn't always mean anything bad or toxic happened (although maybe it did here, we don't know).
All of my grandparents were the type who wanted to get out and see the big, wide world. They chose lives that took them far from where they grew up and didn't go "home" often. They met and married people from other places, which cut even more into the frequency of either couple going "home" because there were two "homes" to visit and both took a lot of effort and planning. For the most part, their siblings didn't have that sense of wanderlust and didn't understand why they chose the lives they did. They grew farther and farther apart from their family back home, not because anything was wrong or toxic but just because they were really different people. As a result, neither of my parents really know their extended family very well.
And that's ok. They're happy people with rich lives, just not people who are close to their cousins or aunts or uncles. My own aunts and uncles have never lived geographically close, either. I like them, I know them (ish), but I don't really invite them to all that much of what happens in my life or expect to be invited by them. They're more just Christmas card relatives, largely because that's the kind of family connection they are most familiar with, and we're all ok with it. We like each other fine, we're just not close.
Doria's parents left the South behind for California at roughly the same time that my grandparents were finding it very hard to keep up long-distance family relationships. There's a strong possibility that Doria grew up without having a ton of contact with her extended family, just for practical reasons. And that may have left her without feeling a strong need to maintain extended family relationships in her own life as she raised her daughter. Meghan may just not really know a lot of this family in the kind of way that leaves you feeling obliged to invite folks to things like weddings.
