Family All Around

Last week I got to visit with a cousin – now isn’t that just the best way to start off any Mountain Story?  Anyway, it seems like I used to see him a whole lot more, but we grow older and busier and the time flies by.  Well Paul is my Daddy’s first cousin and they have history and stories galore – so you can imagine I was eager to sit a spell while the two of them reminisced. 

As I’ve been thinking about the visit, I wondered if this would be too repetitive to share with you so I hopped onto the blog page and searched for how many times I’ve written about family.  Several.  Just this past January, I talked about Intertwining Family Trees.  In 2018, the question of Normal Families was on my heart.  Then I happened upon Mountain Families from September 2016. I decided family is such a central theme among our Scots-Irish roots that it will be a subject I return to again and again, so here goes…

In Mountain Family, I shared a picture (and I’m going to show it to you again this week) because I realized that in 4 years 2 members of that little group have gone home to be with The Lord.  I missed that reunion this year and looking at that picture made me remember (why  oh why do I need these constant reminders?) that every visit is precious and I must try harder to make the reunions!

Back to my cousin and our visit.  Paul’s children are all grown up with children of their own, in fact he now has great-grandchildren.  And he finds himself kind of starting all over with a 9 year old grandson to raise.   I’ve heard people say recently “sadly many grandparents are raising their grandchildren today…” and there is something sad about it – but it is beautiful too!

In my 2018 article about Normal Families, we talked about this pervasive myth that “in the old days” there was a Dad, Mom and a few children who formed a tightly knit family unit and everything was simple and happy.  It’s a great myth. 

I don’t want to re-write that same article, but I think it’s worth mentioning that the modern American family certainly faces problems that were rare just in the 1950’s.  Our divorce rate has been steadily declining since it skyrocketed through the ‘70s and into the 1980’s.  However, the marriage rate has declined over the past 4 decades as well.  While every situation is different, my personal observation is that an awful lot of the children growing up with their grandparents come out of those relationships lacking a marriage bond.

My cousin expressed to me that he wanted this child to grow up with memories of playing with his cousins – memories that he shares with my daddy and many of the 29 first cousins they share.  You can bet my children were more than happy to help him begin the memory-collection.  And it did my heart good as well to see them tramping through woods where I, too, played with cousins.  We went to the Cumberland Mountain State Park where we’ve met for many years for a Labor Day Weekend reunion and they played on swing-sets and ran across the swinging bridge.

My grandparents’ large families had scattered as sister married men from other regions and brother led their families away from the mountain in search of employment opportunities.  Still there always seemed to be family all around us.  With each passing generation, those raised away from Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau return less and less – leading their children to have fewer memories and more distant relations with their cousins.

I may not have the hilarious memories Daddy and Paul have of firecrackers in coat pockets, feeding younger cousins green apples under the porch or picking pen feathers from Grandma Key’s chickens, but I still treasure the time I had with my cousins while we were all growing up.  And Paul and I share the strong desire for this current generation of children to look back to similar experiences.

I can only hope my own children don’t find the mischief that Paul and Daddy did!

Normal Families

A friend was recently sharing with me how her adult children are causing her grief and the feeling of failure she has as a mother.  She asked, “Are any families normal anymore?” Well you guessed it, that got me to thinking…

The question of normalcy is not about right and wrong but about what everyone else is doing.

The Cleavers defined family in 1957 and that’s the picture many of us maintain today.  Mama at home in high heels and perfectly coifed hair, Daddy comes home with an un-mussed suit to two children who are not never angelic but who always see their mistakes within the allotted 30 minute time slot.  Oh for a sit-com life! 

So when was the world filled with Cleaver-like families? 

Well, not in the Old Testament where the very first family was so filled with jealousy that Cain killed his brother Abel, Abraham fathered a child with one of his servants, Lot tried to prostitute his daughters to the Sodomites, and Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery.  It really just goes downhill from there with Old Testament families burning their children to satisfy a pagan god, men taking multiple wives (let’s don’t even get started on Solomon and his 1,000 woman harem) and warring and killing within families.  Now we know that God shows us the extremes of human depravity to teach us the importance of obedience and the cost of sin.

We’ve talked here before about families that gave away children because they simply couldn’t feed everyone; that created homes with children from more than one family living together.  When maternal mortality rates were near 40% in the 1800’s and the life expectancy just beginning to climb beyond 40, what we now call blended families were downright normal as men would remarry quickly after losing a wife in childbirth – sometime with the newborn surviving and needing care – and a widow had little means of supporting herself and her young children.

As we discussed here a few weeks ago  the census records often show us “boarders” or “servants” living in a home who we know to have been nieces or cousins; these people were more part of the family than paying guests.  Even strangers renting a room often married into the family in the days of limited travel and sometimes limited courting opportunities.

So this question of family troubles is nothing new – but Solomon said that, didn’t he? Ecclesiastes 1:9 “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”