Family

Something that truly struck me during that trip to Boise was just how important family is to a person. It affects who you are, what type of person you are. Your own personal history is there with your blood relatives, and has had far more influence on you that what might normally be imagined.

Many of the relatives I’ve been with this past week I’ve only met once or twice, and there’s a whole branch of the family I’d met that I’d not even known existed. And in all of them I saw myself or someone I’m related to. My father’s eyes in my cousin; the same mouth was on 7 different people, including myself. Even personality traits. Jean, the cousin we’d been staying with, I’ve only met once. Yet she’s very similar to me. Always doing something, rarely idle and then only when the majority of the work’s been done.

Another thing is a family’s history. It’s every bit as much a part of a person as the blood ties. Oral tradition’s been practiced since we first started speaking; old family or clan stories told by grandparents and elders to uninterested young. The majority of my aunt’s stories, my sister and I could finish for her. Though we were interested, we loved hearing those stories.

We’ve heard all our lives about our great-grandmother’s siblings, who were sympathetic twins. About how my great-grandfather was a jeweler, yet my great-grandmother had to modify her wedding dress to wear in church as she played the piano. About twice-great grandfather Garland and the miniature tools he’d made, which have only recently been pulled from display in the Capitol Building. My great-uncle and his boat races, and my grandfather’s motorcycles and airplanes. The things my aunt did with her brothers when she was younger.

All those old stories have contributed to the people that Rena and I are. It’s as much our history as it is the history of the people who’d died before we were even born. My aunt never married, never had any children; but in a way she was the matriarch of the family. Something my cousin Ernest mentioned this past week – an era has passed with my aunt.

It’s important, it’s a trait forgotten by many people. But I believe anymore that it’s just as important as always, perhaps more so as the basic family unit’s disintegrated into fragments barely in contact with each other. It helps strengthen family bonds, provides a sense of personal identity that otherwise would be lost. It’s something crucial.

Bore your children regularly with stories about your parents & siblings & grandparents. Do it little by little over time, until the tales are etched into their subconscious. Make it something close, something done when you can really relax with them, share closeness with them even when you’re teaching them their history. They’ll be glad of it in later years, I’m sure. It’s part of them, what makes them what they are and will be.

shayla