The Circularity of Time

[joyfinderhero]

Noticed the other day that I was giving far more thought and daydream-time to the past -- my childhood, and even my mother's childhood -- in recent years than ever before. Began to wonder if that was somehow a "turning 60" thing. Like the "turning 40" thing of looking to reconnect with long-lost childhood / teenage friends. Or the weird thing that happened around 40-45 of old boyfriends turning up to see if, now that they'd been divorced or widowed or were traveling on business or whatever, they could get lucky this time when we hadn't had sex in our previous relationship. (That was pretty strange, actually -- felt like they were just trying to cross me off the list of 'ones that got away' or something.)

But this thing now: Dwelling on the differences between my childhood, and my kids' childhoods, and my grandkids' childhoods. The obvious practical ones -- they have cellphones, computers, assorted private phone numbers for every individual in their lives, where my kids and I shared a single phone number for the entire household and my mom only had a phone for her dad's business. So she wrote letters, and our phone calls were necessarily shorter and more likely to be monitored. Or at least our parents had some idea who was calling us. We had huge amounts of unsupervised free time between homework and supper, today's kids seem to be tightly scheduled and always in some organized activity or other.

But also a lot of differences in fortune among the generations of my family. My mom was raised in a house with multiple servants, her parents in their 40s and well established before she was born. Then she came of age at the start of the Great Depression, and then "the" war (this would be World War Two) ... so we were raised in a house with a once-a-week maid who did floors and changed beds and helped mom with spring cleaning and the like. My kids were raised predominantly by a single mother (me) who often wasn't sure whether the money would last to the end of the month and sometimes served rice and beans for a week or two at a time. Even after I landed a "good" job.

My mom learned to cook at the age of 33 when she married my dad, having never needed to know more than boiling an egg before that.  I learned to cook at the age of 18 when I first moved into an apartment, having never been much allowed underfoot in the kitchen before that. My kids were both accomplished cooks before they were 10, having discovered that their mom was too often willing to just do something boring.

And so on. Why is this coming so forward in my awareness just now?

Is it that my powers seem to be waning, the loss of physical capacity becoming a commonplace? Is it that my granddaughters, at 5 and 7, have arrived at ages I can remember myself being, so the differences are graphic? Then what is it that evokes my mother's childhood, a place I never visited and about which I really heard very little. But have all these mind pictures about ...?

But it sure is here. The more I try to write fiction, the more I seem to be hooked into decoding some of the never-before-understood elements of my mom's life. Which is the odder because she's no longer on-planet to ask about it.

Maybe it's that nowadays when I look in the mirror, it's her face I see. Maybe it's that now I can relate to so many things she never really talked about. Or maybe ... something else.

Proud of myself today, though. Today I did yoga, paid bills, returned phone calls, completed the list of errands. Only wished for a game of solitaire a dozen times, but each was brief. Today my novel-writing class began. Today I completed the next step of pre-teaching homework for Vermont camp next month. Today I am more centered than yesterday.

Progress.

Comments

[swansister.livejournal.com]

You know, not all children today have such drastically different lives.

My eight-year old does not have a cell phone or television in her room. I still want her to experience the same joys of childhood that I did. Innocence and freedom....

I took a social gerontology class last semester and it had me pondering very similiar thoughts. I do think it is part of turning 60 but it is also a result of the fact that there are more people in your life now at 60 then at 30 or 40 for you to think about. Your intimate circle of family has expanded. It is just natural to have think about them and their lives.

Be well,

Swan

[johanna-hypatia.livejournal.com]

Whatever you find by exploring there, I would be interested in hearing it. The continuity transmission of mother to daughter -- and the connection to all the grandmothers -- tell me more...

My Mom does genealogy, and I looked up our ancestors in the direct female line, but we only had names going back four generations. She even went to Ireland and looked in old parish records, but that's all the information she's found.

[northlighthero.livejournal.com]

The genealogy thing is sometimes entertaining, sometimes frustrating, sure tells us a lot about sexism and racism.

My mom did lots of genealogy for both her forebears and my dad's. In several of the lines, folks had recorded only the first names of the women the sons had married, so following the female line was problematic. Sometimes some letter or other ancillary document would show what town or county she was from, but still not mentioning her family surname (sigh).

We also have family traditions about possible Native American ancestors, but there again seems to be no documentation -- more a notion that when it was fashionable to claim an "Indian" then some particular "Sarah" of whom little was known would be said to "probably" be a "Cherokee or Choctaw" ... but when it was out of fashion, then some letterwriter would reply "of course not!"

Conversely, when the daughters married, the men would be identified by full name and city -- in the same lines.

Newspaper clippings often thereafter identified the women only as "Mrs. Charles B. Smith" etc, which becomes hard to follow when the headstones or family bible tell us that Charles had two or three wives, remarrying after being widowed.

But ... I see a rant coming ... believe I'll stop now (grin).

[johanna-hypatia.livejournal.com]

I share similar doubts and wonderings about possible Indian ancestry. In western Pennsylvania about 200 years ago there were two sisters named Patience and Charity. It was rumored that they were Indians and they got baptized with those names. My ancestor married Charity, so I figured I was 1/64 Indian. Their grandson, my great-grandfather, was nicknamed "Black Mike" and supposedly his dark skin indicated Indian blood. From his picture it's hard to tell. A picture exists of Charity's son (my ancestor's brother) who looks definitely nonwhite somehow. However, I now think that Patience and Charity were really black, and the family's "Indian" legend was made up to disguise that. The only way to find out is DNA testing.