There's lots and lots of reading. HEAVY reading. But good reading. All about what trauma is and what it does to your brain and body and behavior. And family and community and world.
Something struck me in one of the readings, something about how American family life has changed over the last 200 years, and we are living in opposition to our evolutionary and biological wiring. How we went from surrounding ourselves with our families, how we were typically ten or twenty relatives deep in a town or on a farm or in a clearing in the woods and as we married and had children, it got bigger and bigger and bigger and we always had someone to help out with whatever it was we needed help with. Then people started branching out and moving away and today the average American household is less than four people and 26% of us live alone. Cats notwithstanding.
♪♫Cue Carole King.♫♪
My grandparents' families were immigrant families. Only my dad's dad lived and died in the town where he grew up. The town he grew up in isn't the one he was born in, but it was where I was born. And subsequently moved from a week or so after my 18th birthday.So what about that?
What about the fact that we aren't so cohesive anymore, we've all been moved around and shuffled about? That we continue to move around and shuffle about?
That we don't feel a need to be close to our families?
Air travel and telephones and internet service and social networks let us feel so connected that we are free to go.
But this movement and shufflement is older than technology.
Most of us, as Americans- by virtue of being American- come from uprooted and broken families. Uprooted and broken ancestries. No matter if our families got here by choice or by chance or by desperation or by force- by immigration or by exile or by slavery- they got here uprooted and broken and confused and probably more than a bit apprehensive. Afraid.
Our parents or grandparents (or great grandparents, or great great, or great great great, depending on how long your people have been here) left their moms and dads.
And maybe their siblings.
And maybe some of their children.
And their friends
and their stuff
and their fellowship
and their community.
And their foods
and their houses
and their customs
and their land
and their clothes
and their animals
and everything heavy
and unnecessary
and bolted down.
Everyone sick
and everyone weak
and everyone resistant.
Everything and everyone anyone ever knew.
Leave.
Left behind.
Break away.
Broken.
Imagine the feelings they must have had. The frustration. The grief. The anticipation and excitement. The newness of it all. The strangeness. This foreign place. Imagine the effect all those feelings had on the way they lived out their lives here. Depending on where and when they landed, weather was a challenge. Germs. Employment. Language. Education. Wildlife. Savages.
How did it effect their physical health? Their mental health? Emotional health? Marriage? Family ties? Parenting practices? Social life? Levels of faith and love and trust and hope?
Imagine the desperation to uphold traditions. All that dumb stuff grandma made you do because 'that's just what people do, that's just what we do'.
Imagine grasping for shreds of comfort. Shreds of familiarity. A sense of home. Whatever that means, whatever that meant. No amount of property or success or wealth could save anyone from feeling homesick. Lost. New.
Old people are so crazy.
And their children are crazy and their children's children are crazy.
We are all so crazy.
Lots and lots of newness and getting-used-to-stuffness and craziness getting passed down as we all try to heal ourselves from our family breaks, from our own breaks. As we try to make up for the sacrifices made for us. To be good enough. To make it worth it. To keep our family identities. To create our own. To make way for ourselves, our children. Catching up with the past while the future spirals before us. Ever changing, never slowing.
It's a damned big job and it's taking hundreds of years, without an end in sight.
9 degrees {comments}:
Great post!
Sometimes, I wish I'd lived in a time when people and families were closer. It's kinda sad knowing that my children are not growing up where I'm from, but then again, I couldn't wait to leave that small town!
Sigh...
Heavy stuff. Wonderful post.
Would you mind sending me the reading list for your class? I've been doing research into trauma/PTSD for my own work and would like to collaborate...
xoSMJ
Wonderful post! I never really thought about this like that. But you are so right...we have a false sense of family with cell phones, Skype and the like!! We are just not close knit anymore. At times, I feel that ache for kinship and close ties. I am close with the grandkids and that is a true blessing!!
Hugs
SueAnn
Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.
~~~John Ed Pearce
We grow through life together.
I watched the Beatles come and go.
Woodstock.
When Andy Gibb of the BEE GEE's died, a part of me did too.
Never met the guy; but he was gifted and too young to die.
Drug OD's of Janis Joplin, and a list of singers to long to make, my cousin, a neighbor, a childhood friend...moved on from the planet.
All of the Presidents are a part of my family, for we all had preferences and dislikes.
No Founding Father had to witness the bastardization of their works and papers over time....
"Let's prohibit drinking; Let's prohibit Prohibition"....
nor did they have to witness Charlie Sheen or Lady Gaga.
The world is your family, and we move in generations like a series of bumps in a python, carrying all that was alive in our time period, along with the bumps.
Then, a high school friend passes life. And another. You read the Obits more, and KNOW too many.
Few want to go back to the lack of modern conveniences, and virtually NONE of the Wired Generation would survive the time travel, without a wireless connection to keep their life filled by seconds.
The cultures changed and you are in a culture of your generation.
Your Carole King hyperlink is attractive. Earlier generations listened to "Strange Fruit", a song of Negroes hanging on tree limbs.
We cannot erase any part of our generational period of life...or our family within that.
You will feel this more when Jake goes to college and gets smitten with a gal from Montana, in his same college...and he moves away for HIS generational experiences, with her.
Then, you will hyperlink to the Rolling Stones singing "As Tears Go By".
Or the Beatle's, "Eleanor Rigby"
"Ah look at all the lonely people
Ah look at all the lonely people
Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?
All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?"
The world has never had so many people. The world has never had so much loneliness.
Being with family is an antidote to loneliness, which is an awareness that we long to be in fellowship together.
Like salmon swimming upstream a final time, to spawn and die, where they got their own start, we end as we began:
Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.
~~~John Ed Pearce
Great post Lora... I've always been really interested in sociology and what makes generations do what they do and how each generation is so different but yet the same. The way things cycle back interests me too. I keep seeing the twentysomethings now wanting a modern day version of what everyone had in the 50's....
A very thoughtful posting. Makes you think about so many things. And no doubt we go in different directions on our thoughts.
My parents were prisoners in a labor camp during WWII and lost many family and friends. But yet I have to say that they seemed more connected to people from their past than most of us do nowadays. Perhaps it was a recognition of shared hard times and losses. I don't know if we today really honor the relationships we have. It seems that people are quick to critize and judge.
I feel it's important to honor each individual and be respectful of where they came from and where they are going . . . for whatever reasons.
Interesting. It has been said that we are the most adaptable species on the planet...plasticity at its best.
I often wonder about this. My dad came here when he was 16 with fifty dollars and no English. He's never gone back and I wonder and marvel at him.
He wanted, I think, to assimilate completely and that is to blame for the fact that he never taught my sister and I Italian. About which I am still insanely bitter.
My fear always was that one of my sisters or my brother would move away and the four of us wouldn't be together as we always are. And then I'm the one that left. I can't wait to go home.
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