Nora asked in a comment if I was taking poetic license with any of my family stories.
Firstly, if you find family histories interesting, you should check out Bossy’s family tree. She’s the one who gave me the idea. She has a stack of old family pictures and is posting them one by one, telling an extremely detailed story of her great-grandparents, her grandparents, and her mother. I am so impressed with the amount of knowledge she has about these people, and she tells the story in little bites, keeping us all really interested.
In comparison, my knowledge of my family history is patchwork. I know, for example, that my maternal grandmother was adopted, and she met her birth mother but never her birth father – but I don’t actually know why she was given up for adoption. I know that my folks had that conversation about being exclusive after washing a car – but I’m not totally sure how it ended. I know that the little next door neighbor was killed by his brother throwing an iceball (oh, the parents loved to trot that story out when we kids would hit each other – HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF YOU KILLED YOUR BROTHER LIKE LITTLE JOHNNY SMITH DID BLAH BLAH BLAH) – but I have no idea whether my mom was 5 or 25 when it happened. Things like that. I take the anecdotes that I remember, and am doing my best to stitch them together.
What’s disturbing is how much I don’t know. What year did my grandparents get married, and how did they meet, and how old were they? How old were my parents when they met? How long did they know each other before they got married? Did my mom live at home when they were dating, or had she moved out? As I write this out, I realize how little I know, and it makes me want to know more. All four of my grandparents passed away years ago. I was still a kid, and didn’t think of them as people at the time, so I missed out on a chance to ask them all of this stuff. It would have been interesting to know more about them.
With what I do know, I’m sure that I’ve got some details wrong – ages, chronology, or maybe I remember a story totally wonky. I haven’t verified anything – yet. My thought was, I’m going to write out what I think I know, based on the stories I heard from my parents as a kid, and then maybe send it all to them and see what they can add or change. Or maybe send it to my siblings first, and see what we can come up with as a group, and then forward it to our parents and see how right or wrong we are. I’m also assigning motivations and psychological stuff to intimate relations, which is interesting. I wonder what they’ll think of what I think of them?
In any case, it’s been a neat exercise to pull all the old family stories from the back of my head and try to form a coherent and, I hope, interesting narrative from them. At the moment the only other things I have to write about are (a) pregnancy, the discomforts of, and (b) husbands, and missing them. So I thought a bit of perspective might be in order, which is why I started the series! Hope you’re enjoying it!
sometimes when your grandparents turn 85 they tell youthing you don\’t want to hear though too…like they cheated on your grandfather…cause he was always cheating…and she wasn\’t sure why cause he was horrible in bed…ha ha ha…
*~* :o) if you don’t have a smile to give today… :o) I will give you one of mine… :o) *~*
Skrumshz that is too funny. I was just wondering if your family was super open. I was mostly curious, hopefully not judgmental. I love this idea and really should start working on it on my own, while my grandmothers are alive. I need to go back to Bossy\’s I don\’t recall if I bookmarked that or not. Mostly I like the way you paint a picture, you have a gift for storytelling.