Through the Generations: Family
Photo by Rod Long
It is one of the most valuable gifts mankind has been given and at the same time one that sometimes can be the most maddening… FAMILY! No one wants to be in this world alone, with absolutely no one to relate to, no one to care for or to have care for you. Family! The way life works – the way God designed it, if you are a person of faith – each person who is born came from two other people, a male and a female, who, in a perfect setting, would be committed to the care of the new life. These days people have children with donated sperm or eggs, and all kinds of situations have become “family” these days. But even if this is the case, people still devise family. We are meant to be related to others.
Traditional family means that you are genetically related to a line of people that goes back through the generations. While we may have more than the traditional way of creating family now, we are also going through a time when genetic testing has opened up the door for tracking our family members back through the generations. Just a swab of the inside of your cheek can lead genetic sleuths to find relatives that you never knew were a part of your family. It can be an eye-opening experience to find that you are related to George Washington, say, or Queen Victoria of England; it can be an experience of a different sort to find that within your family lineage you have Adolph Hitler or Pontius Pilate.
But for our purposes today, I am much less absorbed with the esoterics of genealogy or the makeup of family, and more interested in the subject of the blessings that come from family, and how we can care for those nearest to us. My husband comes from a blending of several family lines all of which settled near Lake Erie in Ohio and Pennsylvania. As he grew up, stable family groups who functioned as a happy support system for his own parents surrounded him. He never had to wonder about his own heritage. It lived right before his eyes.
The first time I visited my husband’s home, I remember well being taken all over the little town he grew up in so that I could meet his two sets of grandparents and friends of parents and grandparents and the friends of those friends. In fact, his maternal grandparents lived in the house directly connected back yard to back yard with his own house, and the three generations moved back and forth from home to home with ease. My husband and his sister were just as at home in their grandparents’ home as in their own. And “Granddad” would come over in his sleeveless undershirt and plunk down for a while to see what his daughter’s family was up to several times each day. It was as natural as day and night to my husband, but I had never lived in the same town with any of my relatives, and I found it charming and unusual.
What this type of family brings to a tiny person is a wonderful sense of belonging to a unit that is expansive enough to withstand the unexpected or the occasional changes that life brings. When things are going well for a member of the group, everyone rejoices together. When things are going awry for someone, everyone pitches in to help. My husband still feels that sense of tight family bond as the glue that makes the world right, even as we are now the oldest living generation.
My upbringing saw many moves over many states, and thus, much more distant relationships with extended family. We visited my maternal grandparents at Thanksgiving and/or at Easter, and my fraternal grandparents at Christmas and often once during the summer. My father’s parents would visit us occasionally. That was all that I saw of them until we finally moved to Kentucky and lived about two hours’ drive from their home. After that, we saw my Father’s family about once a month. For a small child, it was kind of a nagging fear that my brothers and I would be on our own if something ever happened to my parents. I can remember waking up after having nightmares that one of my parents had died. I was always sooo relieved to find that I was just having a fearful dream and that both of my parents were fine.
At present, my husband and I have children with families of their own living in Washington D.C., in Charleston, SC, in Cedarburg, WI, in New York City, on the North Fork of Long Island, and two, the twins, still live in the Pittsburgh, PA area. We are now the grandparents to sixteen grandchildren with another on the way, and my husband is presently building an addition onto the home of one of our daughters after our home sold unexpectedly in only three days. We certainly have been blessed to have seven children who were concerned that we would have a good place to live, and we had to think hard about whether to make the move we are now making. Because who wants to be a buttinski or a burden upon a child???
But this takes us back to the fact that at one point my own parents had to consider where to live at the end of their lives. My father felt that they needed to be near one of their children, and I was their only daughter and probably the most stable of their children, plus my husband simply stated that they should move in with us, because family means that people should always have a place to live with folks who love them. This happened at a point in our lives when illness threatened the situation in our family, so my parents came with the idea that they could possibly help us through a rough patch. I will always be grateful that they did this. And it is that hope that I have for my husband and me. It is my hope that our presence so near my daughter and her family will be a positive thing for all of us. My parents lived with us for seventeen years. What that meant to me and my family might be several blog posts, but let me just say that it did teach me to be grateful for the generations.
Grandparents feel the energy of young children. It definitely keeps my husband and me entertained to hang out with a one year old and a three year old. Hopefully our slower way of moving and our many years of life can give those two balls of energy something useful just by our presence. Right now they love to come and sit with us. The three year old loves to tumble all over my husband. Maybe the children will feel that our presence gives them that security that my husband grew up with. Maybe they won’t have nightmares that their parents are gone and they are alone. Who knows? And my daughter and our son-in-law hopefully will not see us as a difficulty, but will see us as help. I know it is a blessing for us to have them around to help us with lifting a few things and to talk over the events of the day. It just enriches us!
When my parents died nine months apart in my home, I determined that I would never move in with one of my own children. I felt that it was unfair to expect them to take care of my husband and me in addition to all their other responsibilities. But now I look back on my years that my parents were with us, and I realize that I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. It was a true blessing to have them with me. It would have hurt my heart to know that strangers were caring for them during those final two years; that they might have felt alone, without family…without people who loved them. I had good caregivers helping me, but I was there every morning when they woke up and every night when they went to sleep and popping in and out when I wasn’t the only one on duty. I now treasure that time. Family is one of the greatest gifts mankind has been given.