Tag: family-history

Grandparents’ Day

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment

Bet you didn’t know that there is a holiday in September called Grandparents’ Day. In the United States as well as some other countries. It falls on the first Saturday after Labor Day, which is September 13th this year. Not a big holiday–no parades, fireworks, or gifts.  It’s more of a family holiday where grandparents and grandchildren celebrate each other.

My late husband and I  were blessed with grandchildren (four), but I was shortchanged with grandparents.  My maternal grandfather was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1916, and his widow only lived to 55, dying before my parents were even married.  My paternal grandparents, who were divorced, had 12 grandchildren.  I seldom saw my grandmother. We had step-grands who didn’t take much interest in us, but we were close to my father’s father who had an apple orchard and a cider press and would try to stay connected with his oldest son’s  abandoned brood of three. A generation farther back, I lucked out–t with great-grandmothers

Ida Scoviille Hiewitt and Alice Muinger Stewart  are the great-grandmothers ones whose stories I will share on my weekly email missive to my daughters, niece, and nephew. I  knew my mother’s grandmother Alice and  my father’s grandmother Ida through stories told by my mother and my aunt. I will also honor in memory my own mother as a grandmother to my children.  What these three women had  in common was a genuine interest in young people and a willingness time to spend with them. 

My mother was close to her grandmother but also well acquainted with her grandmother-in-law, who raised my father when his parents separated. As a result, my mother had a huge fund of stories to share. Recounting family history through stories is a great gift from someone who knows the stories and can tell them well.  My mother told me many times how much I resembled both Alice and Ida in personality as well as appearance. Alice refused to raise her two children in the harsh conditions of homesteading in Kansas and brought them back to Connecticut, to which her husband reluctantly followed.  She also marched for women’s suffrage in 1913.  Ida married a small-time dairy farmer, but she inherited her father’s real estate business. She was successful enough to send all three sons to college in the early 1900s. 

My mother also told me and my children stories of her high school days as a social butterfly and the hardships of the Great Depression and even stories of her failures, like wrecking her sister’s car and getting arrested for driving without a license.  She longed to be a writer as did my sister and I, All three of us have found ways to express that gift, starting with being the associate editors of the Torrington High school newspaper in (respectively) 1926, 1953, and 1958!

I too storytelling seriously, a way to connect  my four granddaughters with their history. My number three granddaughter, Bella, would sit at my dining room table when she was in preschool and say, Grandma, tell me another family story.

Here is one favorite family story about their beloved Aunt Carla at the age of five.  We had just moved for a one-year stay in Boulder, Colorado, and I took the children to school to meet their teachers. I mentioned that Carla, not quite six, could read. Oh, the teacher said,  a lot of parents think their children can read because they have memorized some of their favorite stories.  Let me put it this way,  I said.  I was in the bank with my girls and Carla said, Mommy, do you like service charges? No, I said, why? Well, said Carla, that sign over there says “Don’t like service charges? Neither do we.”  Too young with a September birthday to put in second grade, Carla stayed in first grade in a one-person reading group! Many years later my older sister told me a similar story about my introduction to first grade  when I had been reading for two years. And my youngest granddaughter, despite her protest at age four that she couldn’t read until she was six, was clearly reading signs and menus and cereal boxes! Early literacy tied three generations of readers together.

Storytelling helps you understand where your cowlick and your left-handedness and height or lack thereof came from and which of the members of your extended family shared your gifts—athletic, musical, artistic, or storytelling. Or cooking, or caregiving, or carpentry. And stories of  how earlier generations met and married, and what career paths they chose and why.

It would be nice if your grandchildren made you a card or sent you a text for Grandparents’ Day. But the real challenge is for us grandparents to accept our role of being memory keepers and storytellers who link the generations together.

Holley Ulbrich is a retired Clemson economist with four granddaughters and one great-granddaughter.  You can visit her blog, Purple Sage 41, to read more.

Mothering and Letting Go

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment

I know mothers who are deeply engaged in their children’s lives. I don’t mean mothers of young children or adolescents. I mean mothers of adults, children who have graduated from college, moved away from home, got married, and had children of their own.  I am happy for them and hope that there is much joy in their relationships. I love my daughters and granddaughters, but I am not that kind of mother, and I think the feeling is mutual.

The separation process is challenging for mothers and daughters. As daughter of a mother, mother of three daughters, and grandmother of four more, I have experienced it first and second-hand. My own mother lived to age 92, the last 25 after moving to the town where I lived and wanting to be more a part of my life than I was willing to accept.

It begins when an adolescent girl says in some way, I have my own vision of my future and it’s not the same as yours.  My mother, who was raised in a very post-Victorian world, thought that every woman should a) get married, have children, manage a household and expect a man to support her and b) acquire a marketable skill in case she needed to go back t work. Every girl of my generation heard the options: teacher, nurse, secretary.  When my mother offered those options to me at 15, I said, I think I will be an engineer. (Source: Sputnik had just leaped into space, and my father, from whom she had been separated for 13 years, was an engineer—although he had no involvement with our family. Eventually, I became an academic economist.) 

I wanted to marry and have children, but my focus was on a professional career, not a backup strategy. My mother was a social butterfly in high school, while I was a born academic who knocked the charts off standardized tests. I dated faithfully to appease my mother, but my heart wasn’t in it until I met my future husband in college. She also passed on the traditional belief that sons were more important because they carried on the family name and had to support their families, so it was especially important that they get an education, while it might be wasted by a woman.  Betty Friedan, where were you? (Fortunately, my brother was not academically inclined, and went to a technical high school instead. And I worked while in high school to save enough for two years of college, but scholarships took care of it anyway.)

That’s not an uncommon story of the women of my generation, the pre-boomers (I was born in 1941) and early boomers. It was easier for my daughters, who grew up with the expectation of careers and marriage and maybe children.

The other part of the story was conflicting values. My mother was understandably cautious, and not adventuresome. She didn’t get a driver’s license till she was 55, and flew on a plane for the first time in 1961 to visit her first grandchild. My sister and I were both counting the days to when we could leave our hometown and see the world. She was a Republican.  I always joked that she was so relieved that I came home from my first year of collage neither a Communist nor pregnant that she didn’t mind that I had become a Democrat. (Many years later she discovered that her social and political values were more Democratic than Republican.)

But in other ways I am my mother’s daughter. I have her sense of humor and passion for writing. I like to sing hymns around the house. I am a pretty good seamstress, a skill she taught me. I am a better, more adventurous cook than she would even consider being. I share her love but not her skill at growing plants.  She had a passion for politics which both of us inherited from her grandmother who marched for women’s suffrage in 1913. We both could play the piano by ear and loved cats, 

Before she arrived here in 1976, mother had lived with my brother and his wife, which did not work out well for anyone concerned. Over time, I managed to set boundaries that allowed us to peacefully coexist in my small Southern college town. The day she died, she confided to me that the last 25 years in this place 900 miles from home were the happiest years of her life. I worked hard to get her to let go of mothering me in order to enjoy what I have at age 82—the freedom  to restructure life after the intensive stage of mothering, to be myself again, to set my own schedule, to have a cordial and loving but non-invasive relationship with my daughters sons-in-law, and grandchildren but my own social life and my own friends, causes, and communities.

My daughters are almost there. The oldest had only one child, who is in a slow transition from college to finding her place in the world, but it is happening. My second daughter is married but has no children, although she is a much beloved aunt. I had a beloved aunt too, also without children, that my sister and I adored.  And my children had such an aunt too, although she did have two adopted sons. Perhaps at a certain age we need to cease being their mothers and become aunts instead!  My youngest daughter has three children and is still involved in their lives, but change is headed her way.  All my daughters have careers, adult friends, community activities, and supportive spouses.

I look back on my mother’s life, its challenges and disappointments, her identity defined primarily as a wife and mother and grandmother. I am grateful that I was born in the first generation of both-and instead of either-or, a professional career and a family. I am also grateful that I found a husband who clearly stated he did NOT want me to live vicariously through him (I said okay!). My life after parenting has been full of opportunities, challenges, and adventures. As a mother, I am grateful that my daughters could lead both/and lives, and that my granddaughters are all on track to do the same.