Tradition and Traditional Families

One thing I have to admit is that I think the challenge of my "Grass is Green on the Other Side" syndrome is a real challenge these days.

I suddenly realized last week that part of my mourning Mom is mourning not only my loss of my Mother but my loss of my family in so many ways, at so many levels.

My father is long deceased - 1985. My sister is long estranged. I have no wife; no children. I feel so very, very isolated at times. So lonely. My mother's sister - my aunt - is in the city and has been wonderful to talk with about these things; but she is elderly herself, has been through so much, and I fear to burden her too much. I've never been very close to her; but since Mom's death, really feel like I've gotten closer. This is a wonderful blessing, a wonderful gift. Yet I feel acutely aware that this is a side of the family that I'm not really a part of.

Where the Grass is Greener on the Other Side comes in is that I tend to mourn the loss not only of my immediate family, but the loss of our whole extended family. I find the whole Hornersville (small town America) of my Mother's past so very, very deeply appealing. The whole picture of Walton's Mountain and of a large family in which someone dies and is buried in the back yard under the apple tree, in a family cemetery, and then the whole mourning experience of the individual is caught up in the mourning experience of the whole family -- it all sounds so very, very wonderful.

And no doubt it is, or can be. On the other hand, it's good to remember that there are pros and cons to everything.

For the reason my own rather nuclear family isn't embedded in a larger family is that, frankly, that's the way Mom wanted it. She chose ... to leave Hornersville, when she was about 18 or 19. She always spoke so highly of this wonderful Hornersville in which she grew up. But she also wanted out. She wanted to move somewhere else and start a family not so closely connected with the traditional extended family culture.

In this she, and my father, were very like so many others in 20th Centure America, weren't they? And I'm in no position to judge them. Reading between the lines, and listening for stories and tales that aren't quite so positive about Hornersville, say: I know in some ways Mom felt smothered, closed in, limited there; also I think she felt too little privacy: everyone knows everything about everybody. And even if our little family was "dysfunctional," so too did our family forebears know dysfunction, loss, and suffering. Hence Mom's Mom said she never really recovered from the loss of Grandpa & Grandma's (Lee's & Bertha's) house in that storied fire that took away almost everything. Then Grandpa Rust was a plain alcoholic among other things. And the family suffered so much loss of life in infants and young toddlers' dying. Nonoe of this was exceptional in the America of the time. And who could blame a young woman seeking a fresh start Somewhere Else: first in Jefferson City, then Columbia, then Tulsa?

There's a part of me that wants to move to Hornersville; or Alaska; or plain run away anywhere else. But ... I think my place is here. The grass is not necessarily greener on the other side.