The Value of Family
A cousin of mine recently retired, and between that and our hiding from covid, we’ve had time to have long phone calls. She and her sister and my sister and I were more like sisters than cousins because of my mother’s close relationship with our grandmother, and because I actually lived in my aunt’s house several times while my mother was in the hospital getting her medications readjusted. My mother had a series of breakdowns throughout her life, including the one she had 4 days after I was born. I lived my first 9 months with my aunt and grandmother. My grandmother’s house had been split into two houses, and my aunt lived in the other half of the house when I was a baby, so they were able to pass me back and forth, and they both became my mother. By the time my mother got out of the hospital, she was a total stranger to me, and I was never as close to her as I was to my aunt and my grandmother.
I’m the second oldest of the four of us, and this cousin I’m spending a lot of time on the phone with is four years younger than I am, so we weren’t real close until we got older. 4 and a baby are a big difference. 69 and 63, almost 64, suddenly doesn’t seem like a big age difference. Now we are close friends as well as being cousins.
It’s so nice to talk to someone who shared your childhood with you, who grew up with the same people you did. She remembers my mother and father; I remember hers. We remember our grandparents. (Whenever I want to feel my age — not often — I look at my grandchildren and think, “I not only knew your great-grandparents; I knew your great-great grandparents.” Works every time.) I was 20 when my grandfather died and 25 when my grandmother died. Gram got to see my second child, and a week later, she was gone. Three years later, her older son died at 61, and three years after that, her second child, my beloved aunt, died at 63. My cousin’s father died the following year.
One of the things my family did was sit around the kitchen table and talk. I don’t know if people do that any more; I think cellphones and computers and all the electronic devices we have now have ended the just sitting and talking. We would drink tea and talk, and I loved hearing the stories of their childhoods and things they’d done and all the stories of their parents and grandparents. My grandmother’s mother died when my grandmother was quite young, and her father remarried twice. My grandfather’s father died when my grandfather was still in school, and he had to drop out to work to help support his mother and brothers and sisters. My grandfather joined the Army in World War I but had to leave because of a condition called “club feet.” I don’t know if there is a newer medical term for that these days, but it must be hereditary, because my older cousin’s first son had it, too. They were able by then to operate and repair his feet, so he didn’t suffer from it at all.
Talking to my cousin for hours at a time now, we can compare notes and memories, and she knows some things I didn’t, and I know some things she didn’t, and now we can put together some things we didn’t understand before. She knew I loved her mother as my own. I didn’t know she wasn’t comfortable around my mother, and she knew nothing of Mom’s mental health problems until years later. She just didn’t feel comfortable around her. Our fathers were about as different as two men could be. Her father flew missions over Europe in WWII and was an alcoholic who scared the crap out of me. My father went from the Navy to college, and my uncle had a chip on his shoulder about “college” people, so the two of them were never friends. But her father was a much better father to her than mine was to me. She knew she could go to her father with any problem, and he would support her. My father always told me I had to stand on my own two feet, and that he didn’t believe in giving people advice because they never followed it. The irony was, when my cousin started looking into genealogy and had her DNA done, it turned out her father wasn’t really her father. But then it turned out HIS father wasn’t really his father, either. That ancestry studying can turn up some real interesting stuff.
My younger uncle did the genealogy of the Morrison Clan, and we all knew the story of how our ancestors had been royalty in Norway but had been dethroned and put out to sea. The boat sank off the shore of the most northern of the Scottish Isles, and one son started the Morrison Clan on one island, and the other son started the McClouds on another island. We know where our tempers come from, because when the English started trying to wipe out the clans, the McClouds decided to behead some Morrisons to show their loyalty to England. We learned Morrisons learned really fast how to climb trees, but the McClouds did get some of us. Their plan didn’t work, though. The English beheaded them anyway.
I loved listening to the stories of our family and often sat with the “grown-ups,” drinking tea and learning our history. My own children, however, never sat and listened, and even now they show only a little interest in their roots. My cousins and my sister and I are the old folk now, and if our children don’t hear the stories soon, it will be too late.
And you can hear such wonderful things. Today I was telling my cousin about two compliments I got while I was teaching in the Catskills, which I refer to as two and a half years in purgatory and six months in hell, but I did get two compliments. One was, “You wouldn’t say ‘shit’ if you had two hands and a mouthful,” which I interpret that I wasn’t a complainer and/or I was a nice person and/or I didn’t use bad language. The other compliment was I was described as a “lady, and that’s a term that isn’t used very often these days.” My cousin started to laugh. She said those were exactly things that had been said of her mother, right down to the words used.
I felt like I’d just gotten a hug from that aunt I love so much. And that’s what family is for.