Daily Dose in the Pod: Our Parents' Memories Become the Road Map for Our Lives. Do We Follow, or Detour From It?
“We had to split one apple among five kids,” my mom repeatedly told me throughout my childhood. This was her equivalent of “There are children starving in Africa,” but far more personal, in that she had suffered the injustice of having been given only one-fifth of an apple when she clearly yearned for so much more. Therefore, I was to live a life filled with apples, despite how much I despised them, and being raised with no siblings with whom to compete for them, anyway.
I’ve tried to pay attention to what my mother brought with her from her upbringing in the north of England, where she and two of her siblings were born before WWII and the last two came after. Their family was poor. At times, there was abuse. And also there were wild adventures and hard-won triumphs, and you can see how a lovely apple might have made for both solace and prize.
But who am I? And how much of that do I want to carry forward? I think it’s important to ask these questions and be intentional about it rather than just let these patterns go unexamined and end up defining our lives.
Yes, some of what my mother experienced is worth not just understanding, but cherishing – like: indeed never take for granted that you have access to fresh produce, because it’s good for you, and often yummy, and a lot of people can’t get any. In my adulthood I’ve come to love apples, perhaps because I now have access to many juicy and crisp varieties beyond the mealy so-called “Red Delicious” which came home in my childhood lunchbox, uneaten.
Other norms from mom’s upbringing I can do without, though, like the idea that you absolutely must make your bed no matter what. To this day, if someone turns the knob on my mother’s door, she’ll hurriedly glance at her bed and if it’s the rare day when her bed is not made she’ll get right up and make it. Even if no one is there and no one is coming, making her bed is an obsession, and she will fold and re-fold and smooth every wrinkle. As I watch her do it, it’s like it gives her some kind of rote reassurance – of safety perhaps, or of keeping up appearances despite whatever shit is going on, or I dunno, something, in her original wiring, written in a code I simply do not comprehend.
As a kid, I resented every apple foisted upon me. Like, I know how to be grateful and not wasteful and yet I still don’t want this apple. But as I grew up, I came to realize that probably every single whole apple my mother gave me was a gift she wanted me to have precisely because she never received it herself. Trying to get to the bottom of Mom’s “Why” for things has helped me be more accommodating of things I wouldn’t otherwise choose for myself. Frankly, it’s made me more tolerant.
How about you? What of your parents’ ways are you carrying forward, and what are you just as happy to do without? And are you examining this stuff, or just letting it happen? Comment below or reply to the email if that’s where you’re reading this.
xo
🤗 Here’s a hug for anyone who is trying to simultaneously perpetuate family traditions while also interrupting unhealthy generational patterns.
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What came to mind for me was how my mom would tell me about eating buttermilk soup when she was a little girl. I heard about buttermilk soup every time I complained about not liking what was being served at the dinner table, and my mom would describe the disgusting taste and the raisins that had been added to the mixture -- floating on the top! My mom's parents had immigrated from Germany before WWII, and during the years before and during the war they raised seven children on a small farm in rural Nebraska. Apparently, buttermilk was easy to make and very inexpensive. Thankfully, my mother never tortured us with her rendition of buttermilk soup. But I did get to experience buttermilk soup!! As a junior in college I studied in Germany, and I was the first in my generation to return to the village where my grandparents had lived before venturing to America. My mother's relatives were delighted to welcome me and they simply could not do enough to make me feel welcome. One evening when I was talking to my mom's cousin about some of the customs and traditions we had adopted from our ancestral home, I mentioned that my mother and her siblings had eaten buttermilk soup. Unfortunately, I didn't mention that they absolutely hated it. The next morning, my mom's cousin was up early preparing a large pot of buttermilk soup -- complete with raisins! When I tasted my first sip of buttermilk soup for lunch that day, I understood why my mom hated it!! It was truly disgusting. But I couldn't tell my mom's cousin. To make it worse, she had prepared an enormous pot so that we could enjoy it for lunch the next day and the day after that. Finally, on the third day I asked for an extra bowl so that I would never have to taste it again. Thankfully, my mom's cousin never guessed how much I struggled to choke down that last bowl of buttermilk soup!
My spouse, Erik, was the third child. He has two older brothers. His mother wanted a girl. His grandmother, who claimed to have accurately predicted all the sexes of her grandchildren, said he was going to be a girl. His parents were missionaries, dependent on donations from their sponsoring denomination in the states. With all the confidence of classic confirmation bias, his parents requested only girls clothing. Erik was dressed in girls clothing for the first four years of his life. This, combined with no small amount of misandry coming from his mother left him very sensitive about any potential feminizing of our boys. Martin, our second child, was/is a thespian who did a lot of dancing in musicals. We had to purchase specialized dance attire on several occasions. At one store I told the clerk, in front of Martin, that if I had a daughter I would have bought her dozens of tutus. Martin, who transitioned to Amelia seven years ago, has told me repeatedly that this was the most painful, upsetting experience of her life because she desperately wanted those dozens of tutus.
At one point a friend of mine told me how at her daughter's preschool in Portland, they had tutu Tuesday where pretty much every kid in the class wore a tutu - gender and sex be damned. Although Amelia's desire for tutus was gender specific, truth is almost all kids love wearing tutus, a fact I regret not having figured out when my kids were young, part of that being my misguided commitment to not feminizing my kids.