Ancestors
Ancestors: 15 November 2024
Driving home from Charlotte in my horrible rental car today I’ve been musing on what it takes to be a good ancestor. That’s what Jonas Salk, who worked for seven years to develop a polio vaccine, said was our greatest responsibility. That he saved millions of people from dying of polio and chose not to patent the vaccine or to profit from it so that it would do the most good for the most people, is a pretty high standard of ancestor.
When I started thinking about this essay it was All Saints Day, the day after All Hallows Eve when the church traditionally remembers the saints/martyrs/forebears of the faith. But I like to take stock of all the people who have made a difference in my life, whether or not I’ve ever known them, whether or not they have yet died. I say prayers of gratitude for people who have helped create the foundation of my faith, or my country, or my education. Sometimes it’s my literal forebears, my parents and grandparents.
Amid these musings my sweet aunt died. She was the last of the immediate older generation who shaped me: two sets of grandparents; my mother and her sister; my father and both of his sisters. Now I am an elder. As Mama once said, I don’t feel nearly as wise as I thought I’d be at this age. Amen. Creaky and arthritic, padded where I once was lean, experienced in the highs and lows of life, but not wise. I feel the weight of being a good ancestor.
There’s plenty I struggle with about my own upbringing. We were a close and loving family, but we didn’t talk about things. We coped, but quietly, alone, behind closed doors. There was a chasm between generations—we loved each other but we were not friends, certainly not confidantes.
The adults of my childhood were vocally demonstrative about God’s providence and sovereignty, but pretty tight-lipped about personal feelings or failings. Reality was perched atop a scaffolding of tautologies. The world is this way because this is the way the world is. We do or don’t do things because certain things are done or not done.
(Perhaps this is why I gravitated to philosophy.)
They instilled a confusing capitalist, Calvinist frugality. Be grateful for all your blessings but maybe don’t enjoy them too too much. Certainly don’t make a show of it. Have an eye for quality and nice things but don’t draw attention to them and certainly not to yourself. Be exemplary but don’t stand out. Adhere to the rules of polite society except when they might conflict with church teaching, in which case honor the church teaching but quietly and without offending anyone. Don’t talk about any of this in public, and really, don’t talk about it at home either. Because this is the way that it is.
In their defense, my parents’ generation did bear the brunt of a lot of societal change. My grandparents reaped the benefit of generations of things being exactly the way they’d always been. White landowners with long standing in the places they lived, working hard and honestly at respectable jobs and serving as pillars of the community. Taking their own parents’ place in the scheme of things, just as they were raised to do.
But my parents lived through Victory gardens and World War II rationing. They married in the late 1950s and were having children as the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, hippies and flower children and feminists for God’s sake, were pulling the rug out from under their set, predictable lives. They were navigating an ocean of change while trying to step into the roles they’d been brought up to assume would be theirs.
And if this were not enough upheaval, then here I came: the third child questioning everything; not understanding why my brothers could do things I wasn’t allowed to do; in love with the radical Jesus who privileged the least of these, set the captives free, ate with the lepers and upended the notion of inheritance. My poor parents.
I felt a terrible constraint in high school, an unwinnable directive to inhabit a quiet refinement in a social circle where I didn’t belong. They so desperately wanted me to be friends with the children of their friends. But those kids were doing all the things I was taught good girls didn’t do. “Do you want me to be popular, or do you want me to be good?” I wanted to ask them. But of course, we didn’t talk about things like this.
They wanted me to be “kind and good and sweet and loving”. To be the cultured and educated Christian girl who supports the men in her life, volunteers in the community, raises sweet children who go to preschool in smocked jumpers and votes Republican (but no yard signs). Most importantly, they wanted me to want this for myself.
“To be nobody but myself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.”
I’ve tried to be a different parent. I’ve intentionally shown my children pain, confusion, grief but also joy and pride. I’ve explained the nuances of situations that would’ve been easier to gloss over. I’ve tried to help them navigate their own feelings and actions, to see things from other people’s points of view. To have them be able to read a room before deciding how to weigh in. To stick up for, whenever possible, the awkward kid, the weak kid; to understand their own culpability when in an argument with a classmate, or each other. And I’ve tried to hammer home that I love them, I’m proud of them, I claim them.
I’m also trying to give them a sense of abundance that I didn’t feel growing up. We had a big house in a nice neighborhood; I went to a private school. We had everything we needed and, as kids, not a lot of what we wanted. But we all knew kids who went skiing over Christmas break or to an island for spring break. Kids who got a new BMW on their 16th birthday and were showered with trendy clothing for Christmas. Kids who could go to a sleepover on a Saturday and not be picked up early the next morning to go to church.
So it’s infuriating when I feel taken for granted, like my kids are doing me a favor to go somewhere with me, like nothing is ever enough. “You have no idea!” I want to scream at them. Okay, maybe I have screamed this at them. And I can attest that eye rolls are neither an appropriate nor a soothing response.
When the cancer was bad Mama started a list on a yellow legal pad entitled, “Things I have learned (or am learning)”. It is a tender list of gratitude, fear, regrets, prayers. It’s the closest I’ve ever been allowed inside her, and only after she’d died.
One entry I was shocked to read included this: I need to be more understanding, to love more than criticize. I wish I had done more for, and with, our children in their teen years—perhaps ‘spoiling’ is good! To insist on my way as the only way causes hard feelings.
Reading that meant so, so much to me. It still does. Because I ran up against a lot of criticism from both parents, and I think I also instinctively felt how much more Mama wanted to do for and with us, but she herself was constrained by her upbringing. And, if I’m honest, by Dad’s austerity. I’ve often told my children that they have no idea of what strict is.
It’s not totally fair. Because Mark and I are strict, at least compared to a lot of their friends’ parents. Not compared to our parents, but Jack and Emma can’t relate to that, any more than my brothers and I could appreciate how our parents had eased up from their upbringings. But we definitely, absolutely, categorically, were not spoiled!
But even wanting to parent differently, more openly, than my parents, there are challenges we couldn’t have imagined or ever prepared for. Cell phones. TikTok and fake news and a deeply polarized country. A bone deep skepticism of institutions and authorities. An uncertainty that the planet can survive humans. How do I infuse joy and optimism and a responsibility to rise to any occasion?
For me, I lean into our church to help. The Bible, if nothing else, is the ultimate case study in hubris, redemption, wrongheadedness, enlightenment, tragedy, selflessness, human depravity and, against all odds, human excellence. At its best, the church is the embodiment of trying to do better, and, when we know more, to do even better. Grace, forgiveness, high expectations.
One day when Mama was a little girl, she came home crying because a friend at school had teased her. Her grandmother, my feisty namesake, listened to Mama’s complaint, and suggested they make frosting. (Because who really wants the cake anyway?) While they were mixing, Ma Julie said, “If that girl teases you again, Nancy, you say this: that may be true, but YOU have ancestors!” Mama said it worked like a charm.
A few years ago, I overheard this exchange. Jack: Emma shut up! Whatever. Goodnight, I love you. Emma: Love you too. Good night.
They still spar, and still usually end with love.
Imperfect. I’ll take it.
