“Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.”Sue Monk Kidd, Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother and Daughter Journey to the Sacred
As old as I am sometimes I just want my mother back in my life,
if only for an hour. She died in the
early 1980s and I still think of her often, especially when I can’t spell word.
When she was around, I would call her long-distance when my dyslexia was kicking
in and she could always spell the word that had eluded me. Not bad for a woman
whose education was limited by a young life filled with hardships and poverty. She
lost her mother four days after her eleventh birthday and after that Mom was “farmed
out” to a boarding house where she worked for room and board. In her late teens
she left the boarding house and earned a living as a waitress in a diner until he met my dad in her mid-twenties.
She learned how to work hard and make every penny she earned count. At her
funeral I heard so many stories about how she’d secretly slip this person or
that person some money when they were going through hard times and I’ve often
wondered if my dad knew she was doing that with her grocery money. I think he
did. One time I interviewed him for a book of family memories I was writing and
he said the reason he was attracted to her when they first met was because she
was the only girl in the neighborhood who had a job and she had just slipped a
young boy some money and told him to buy a bag of potatoes for his family.
Times were hard and the neighborhood kids never had enough to eat.
Back when I was in my teens, my mom started doing genealogy
research on her family. She and a life-long friend would drive all over the
state gathering information from court houses, going to cemeteries and visiting
relatives they could locate. In the seventies I got in the act. Fast forward to
this past winter when I got out all that long-ago research that sat in a dusty
box in the basement and I went online to fill it all in with rich details and
graphics. This week I finished building and editing a book on her family going
back to 1530. It helped that she had a lot of famous people in her family and
much of the research we couldn’t document in the ‘70s was now online. Placing an
order to get the book printed came with mixed emotions. Mom would have loved
seeing the final results of all our hard work but having the project finally
finished closes one more connection I had with her. At the same time, I’m
excited to be able to introduce my mom to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren
in a way they’ve never known before. Her family were important players in the
birth of our nation (and more) and they should know that.
As I age, as I continue to write, I often wonder if I have an
unlived destiny. Doing genealogy research where you can see the beginnings,
middles and endings of so many lives that had an influence on your own makes
you think about your own destiny in the grand scheme of things. If I had had
children and grandchild I suspect I wouldn’t worry so much about fading into
the darkness. I’d be remembered after I’m gone. And at least a few of life
lessons I passed down would survive through the decades, maybe even the
centuries…like with my mom’s family full of strong women who left their mark
on the world.
A few years ago I built and had printed a genealogy book on
my dad’s family. I can’t do anymore and it’s time to pass the family historian
torch on to the next person to get bit by the genealogy bug. Every generation
seems to have one and I think I know which one it will be, as young as he is. Do you look at your children and grandchildren and
think you can predict their personalities and odds for living a successful
life? And do you predict what life lessons you taught them will get passed down
and which ones will be taken away by time? Like me, do you ache to find an unlived
destiny, or do you feel that you've fulfilled yours already? ©
