Family and all that...

I have been thinking about my family lately.  Specifically, my dad’s family.  There have been some changes recently, and there are inevitably more to come.  Sadly, my dad’s generation is almost gone, and that realization has caused me to reflect on my family.

I am almost the youngest of about 23 cousins on my dad’s side.  As a child, I felt isolated from this side of the family, mostly because we lived far away from them and rarely saw them.  When we did get together, most of my other cousins were already adults and they didn’t really want to hang around with us younger kids. 

My dad’s family was Mennonite.  My grandparents started off fairly well, but in the 1920s, they were pressured to move to Mexico with a large group of Mennonites from Saskatchewan who wanted freedom from the restrictions the Government was placing on education.  So they packed up their year-old son, my uncle, left their farmland, and got on a train to Mexico.  It was a disastrous move for them, and before long, they were attempting to return to Canada.  It took them several years, but they finally made it; in the interim, 4 more children were born, one of whom was left in a small grave in Mexico.  Arriving back in the Canadian prairies in the middle of the Great Depression, my grandparents never really recovered financially, and spent a large part of their family’s life moving around western Canada trying to establish themselves.  They finally settled in the lower mainland, and bought a hunk of land which has since been divided into lots and had houses built on it.  There is a street named after my grandparents that runs along that land.  I’m not sure if any of my aunts or uncles finished public school.  My dad left school after grade 9, but eventually received a University degree, the first in his family to do so. 

My mom’s family is about as opposite as can be.  I am often amazed that my parents grew up in the same century.  My mom’s family consisted of three sisters, and they were raised in a middle-class, white collar home in suburban Montreal.   My grandfather worked in an office in downtown Montreal for his entire career, and my grandmother was a traditional suburban housewife.  My mom and her sisters all went to high school and beyond.  On this side of the family, there are 4 of us cousins, with an age difference of about 4 years between the oldest and the youngest.  For a couple of years when we were growing up, my cousins spent parts of the summer with us on our farm in southwestern Manitoba, and I always felt that we interacted more like siblings than like cousins.  My mom and her sisters are very close, and we have remained knit together through their connection, even though we now live on opposite sides of the continent.

In more recent years, I have reconnected in various ways with my father’s side of the family, even though we live a great distance from them.  Several years ago now, we had a mini-family reunion in southwest Saskatchewan, and I “met” some of my cousins for the first time as an adult.  Some  of my cousins have visited us in the Maritimes, and I have visited some of them out west.  I have really treasured these times spent together.  Living in a place like the Maritimes where family roots reach deeper than the beginning of this country, I deeply feel the sense of being disconnected from my roots. 

It’s a strange thing, this concept of family, and the genetics that go with it.  I think we probably spend our lives creating and re-creating “families” wherever we happen to live or work.  We adopt “grandparents” for our kids, we have close friends with whom we share a “sisterly” connection, and our kids' friends become our "other kids."  Sports teams often talk about being “family.”  All of these people are special and significant.  We spend time with them, we nurture those relationships, we tell our stories and share experiences, and we forge lifelong bonds.  I wouldn’t be without my friends and my adopted “family.”  And yet... when I am with my cousins, there is a very real, very familial connection, even though we live a distance apart, and even though I have never had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with them.  It is intangible and deeper than friendship.  Somehow, even though the experiences of our parents and grandparents are stories to us, the lives they lived and experiences they shared, the people they were, create this deep bond among us. 

It is fascinating to see the similarities between us.  Some of them are physical (curly hair for some of us!).  Others are mannerisms, gestures, ways of speaking.  While visiting us a couple of years ago, the husband of one of my cousins commented more than once how obvious it was that we were related because of the mannerisms we shared.  I look at photos of my dad and his siblings when they were young, and see the likenesses between them and my cousins.  I found a portrait of my dad’s family, taken on the occasion of my grandparents’ 50th anniversary, and was immediately struck by the resemblance between one of my uncles at around age 30, and my youngest nephew at the age of 4. 

I treasure my memories of my uncles and aunts:  Carl, who, when we lived in northern BC, shared his family’s summer cottage with us, where I caught my first fish, and saw cougars in the wild (my last memory of him is him standing outside an old outhouse on the site of one of the schools they attended in southern Saskatchewan when they were children, telling a story of how the boys would get into mischief);  Frank, who always had a sparkle in his eye and a joke or a laugh to share, and the last time I was out west, even though he wasn’t in the best of health, drove 2 hours with his wife to have supper with my daughter and me;  Hank, who helped us get settled in a new home, and occasionally let me tag along to different sporting events with him.  And my beautiful aunts, all of whom have given legacies of being women of strong and meaningful faith:  Sue, with her lovely smile and generous and loving heart; gentle Agnes, who cooked me Mennonite food, taught me some Mennonite words, and has always been happy to share my Mennonite heritage with me; Peggy, who is like my second mother and has been here for so many significant events in our lives; and Ann, fun, funny, loving and faithful.

I believe that the experiences and the people that have gone before are all part of who I am.  I am grateful for each of my aunts and uncles.  I am grateful for opportunities to be connected to some of my cousins and their families.  I am grateful for the stories, the laughter, the memories.  Ours is a legacy of gentleness, faith, strength, love and joy.