My ROW80 check-in is at the bottom of this post, if you want only to look at that.
Shan Jeniah, a writer I have met through ROW80 is participating in Thankvember. While I haven’t signed up, I have been thinking about gratitude. Going through some of my posts while combining my various blogs into one, I found this one still rang true.
The holiday season that ends the calendar year often focuses on family. Many of the bloggers I read have recently posted about family and family celebrations during the holiday season. I, too, am very grateful for my family, but I have very few traditions to draw upon.
My parents both had such Dickensian childhoods, it is nearly unbelievable that they grew up in the 20th century. My father was supposed to be the daughter that arrived two years after his birth. A fourth son, he was seen as completely superfluous. My mother was the youngest daughter in her family; in the Southern tradition I thought went away by the end of the 19th century, she was marked to stay with her parents and care for them until their death. To that end, she was taught early how to run the household, standing on an orange crate to cook and wash dishes at four years old.
My mother and father met on a blind date and married within a year. Because my father was an Irish Catholic from Massachusetts and my mother a Southern Baptist from Georgia, both of their families summarily disowned them. My mother’s family went so far as to obliterate her name from the family Bible. Eventually, some members of both families had some contact with our family, but for most of them, it was limited in both time and warmth. It left a legacy of a real lack of warmth among my own siblings, which is something I realized only in contrast with other families.
Also, my parents seem to have very little tradition to call upon. My father has resisted all my questions about holiday family traditions; my mother has been only slightly more informative, saying that she often got nothing but an orange for Christmas. Because my mother then spun into her “you ungrateful children” speech at that point, I never asked for more details. Given these deficits, my parents tried to give us children the American dream holidays. We rarely had a turkey for Thanksgiving, due to the cost, but my father did relax that day. Christmas Day was a bigger deal, with presents under the tree for the four children. I did notice we never had any other family around, like all my schoolmates did.
Due to this upbringing, I really didn’t bring any holiday traditions to my married life; in my first marriage, I played along with traditions I didn’t feel inside. When I married my second husband, we worked to create traditions together, melding his traditions with my dream holidays. We went through the common tug-of-war between the families, whom to visit when, whom to eat with, whom to stay with if we had travelled. The situation was complicated by my daughters having their own traditions, as well as another set of grandparents, aunts, and uncles to visit. Thankfully, it got much easier as the girls became older and made their own decisions about the scheduling, rather than being pulled so many different directions. Even when they spent less time with us, I felt better knowing they were making the decisions.
Perhaps because of my background, family is very important to me. I don’t tell them often enough how important they are to me. Some of that reticence is due to my teenage sons, who flee emotion as if it were hydrofluoric acid, but sometimes I take all of them for granted.
I am grateful for my sons, who defied all medical opinion to exist, appearing after three doctors had told me I could not have children. They helped me learn how to be a mother to alien creatures, who didn’t act at all like their sisters. Furthermore, I had met my daughters when they were 5 and 3, so 0-3 was uncharted territory. My sons laid to rest any nature versus nurture discussions I had in my mind; their drive and fearlessness taught me how to take risks, while making my face pale with fear.
I am grateful for my daughters, who accepted me as a second mom, and weathered my learning to walk the tightrope, and how to be that second mom. Recently, one of my sons-in-law paid me one of the best compliments I’ve gotten. He told me that the way I accepted and loved my youngest daughter showed her how to love and accept his two children. He said she might not have married him had she not grown up with me. It brought me to tears when he told me, and it does so now.
And I am grateful for my husband, who puts up with my weird mental glitch, where I point right and say left, especially annoying when giving directions in the car; follow the hand, not the voice, is the trick. He accepts my ADD as well as my Irish temper; he glories in my nerdiness, and thinks I’m still as interesting as I was when he met me so very long ago.
To all of you, thank you for keeping me sane, human, and open to the people around me.
ROW80: Not much to report here, I feel like a cop, saying “Move along, people, nothing to see here.” While there is a lot going on beneath the surface, I have very little on the surface that reflects the changes. I am learning and working hard in the blogging class; I have managed to keep up my sponsor duties; I have written scads and scads of words on the academic article and procedural documents at the day job (woo-hoo!)
I will return to the novel and blogging by the end of the year. For now, please go encourage someone in the ROW80 group. They are a great bunch, and can be found here.
Elizabeth Anne Mitchell 