4t and 4teen both need history lesson to make sense of this life and world.
Since the arrival of the 4teens in my life, I have started thinking about immortality, my immortality! As I was thinking, I sadly discovered that my parents were not immortal to me in a theoretical sense either. It started to bother me that I did not know the details of the lives of my parents as individuals and how they were as kids or teenage years. My mother never spoke of her childhood, and my dad never had the time until many years later that he retired.
It is sad that we teach our kids the history of the world, but we never teach them the history of their own parents, or at least I did not. We tell them that the history repeats itself, so learn from it, yet we fail to tell them that personal histories do the same as well. The last course of my family history was completed last week when I spent the whole week with my mother, sisters and nieces. A household full of smart, determined and opinioned women and that is when it struck me where did we all get this gene from!!
A few years ago, when my dad spent two weeks with us, we shared stories of his childhood and his background. He told stories of himself and his life that illuminated a new angle of him unknown to me until then. He has written his family story on a broad perspective, but the pieces that he shared with us put a real human touch to it and after that we never stopped talking about his life as a 4teen, 4t and the following years.
Last week, we all explored the details of my mother’s childhood and as we were discussing that, I realized how much more I have learned about myself. It seems to me that in the past 4teen years, I have been weaving this rug from a design in my head with any color wool thread that I could find and finally last week, it started to take shape and pattern. Some patterns are crooked and sometimes the colors do not match, but it is part of the rug and it blends together and in fact it fits there. It may not be the most beautiful rug in the world, but it is real and it is mine and I am proud of it. I will make sure that I will complete this rug with my history and as I leave this to my 4teens, I will ask them to continue with adding their history into this rug for the next generation.
The way I see it, this is how I will live forever.
5 comments:
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences about the importance of the history of your family, in particular your parents. As I am writing this, I have lit two candles in the memory of my beloved grandmother and aunt, both of whom passed away around this time few years ago. I was thinking how much I miss them and how much it would mean to me to have known them better and heard their personal histories, not to talk about my father who passed on too young and too fast to share much about his life stories, and he was such a great story teller. You are right, we either don't make the time or feel uncomfortable to sit down with our children and tell them our stories. They sometimes ask but I often give them a quick and short answer, not good.
Thanks again for reminding me the importance of what families and shared histories are all about.
I must say that Im agree with you.
you must want to learn about you family heritage I'm not sure that every body wants to go thru that for certain reasons.
you must be very lucky to have the efforts and also the chance and honor to cominucate with your parents and learn they way they grown up, educated, make carieer and build up their family
"The family is one of nature's masterpieces."
George Santayana
Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future. ~Gail Lumet Buckley
I'm just thinking about what you said, and maybe this is my token into understanding who i am...finding out where i came from.
it can go either way. you can either embrace your family history and learn from it, or you can learn it and abandon your family because you're disheartened to learn about them.
Post a Comment