A forgotten family history

Maybe it’s kinda beautiful that I don’t know my family history.

A sort of “we all came from the same ape,” hippy-dippy vibe. Except that the idea of a common human ancestor is so abstract, it’s hard to actually feel that in ordinary life.

And now that my father’s gone, having told us close to zero about his life growing up, that side of my family’s history feels like it’s gone too.

Not that he would have told me anything if he were still with us…

Trust me, I asked.

He would mostly ignore the questions. Push his past aside as though it weren’t important enough to talk about. Maybe it’s not in the grand scheme of things.

Still, I was curious. And giving your son vague answers just to satisfy those questions will only prompt more curiosity and imagination.

But it was probably a trauma response. I get that now.

He didn’t want to speak about his family history

because he didn’t want to think about it.

I think this is common for men of a certain age, who were taught that emotions (and therefore sentimentality) were the roles of their female counterparts. Who were taught to push down the negative feelings – they simply aren’t useful!

Lucky for him, the modern American world we live in doesn’t consider family history all that important. And it’s easy to brush our past aside and label it “not worth talking about.”

Something that happened, and now it’s done.

It’s the “no regrets” mentality we’ve been taught. The “what’s done is done” framework for life that our Western world embodies.

And that’s the extent of it… so stop asking and do your homework, little boy.

But I think this is another attempt to dull the human experience. To think of ourselves as small, little *unimportant* specs of dust on some floating rock in space, so that we don’t have to accept “how high the stakes are in even the average human life.” (David Whyte, Regret)

But we all come from somewhere.

And we all leave a legacy of some kind.

If we really dig into it, we are so incredibly influenced by the people who came before us and all the choices they made.

As the old Irish saying goes, the funny thing about the past is that it’s not the past at all. It’s right with us, in every moment and every fiber of our being.

Those small decisions, that probably seemed unimportant at the time, shape our lives:

Where our ancestors decided to live.

What they decided to do for work.

Where they decided to work out – since in my parents case, they met at the gym. And if my father or mother had chosen to work out at any place other than the New York Sports Club, I would not be writing this right now.

When they decided to work out – if they decided to go before work instead of after work, or if either of them gave in to the common urge not to work out on this very specific day that Dad finally made his move, I would not be writing this right now.

Not recognizing the impact of even our most minor decisions is a sort of defense mechanism. We think of ourselves as purely individual to let ourselves “off the hook.”

We don’t think about the people who came before us… that’s just incidental.

And so it’s also easy to forget about the people who come after us… those whose lives we’ll influence without knowing or meaning to.

I’m not sure that knowing my family history would create more meaning in my life.

But I do think it would make my life vastly different.

So I think I’m going to honor my past a bit more than my parents did when I raise my own children.

It’ll come naturally to me, since I actually love my parents – a place that I don’t think Dad ever got to in his time on this Earth.

Understandably so.

And while he may not have had the same sort of support and unconditional love that I did growing up, I also want to honor his parents.

I’m sure they had their own fucked up lives that influenced how they treated Dad when he was a kid.

They just didn’t have the same resources to deal with it that we do. And their not dealing with it caused them to treat Dad poorly as a child.

And though it was shitty in the moment, the way Dad was treated as a kid was what caused him to parent in the way that he did when raising me and my sisters.

It’s very clear now, through the sort of reflection that can only come when looking at someone’s life as a whole, that Dad lived in a sort of rebellion to how he was treated as a kid.

He felt ignored by his parents… and so he spent so much quality time with us kids.

He felt insufficient to his parents… and so he constantly let us know how proud he was of us for simply existing.

I’m sure the list goes on and on and on.

But all of this… all of the ways he was mistreated and then used that as fuel to treat us differently…has helped make me who I am today.

And I love who I am today.

So in some weird way, I’m thankful to my grandparents. And for the shitty ways they treated Dad. And for the shitty ways they were treated that caused them to parent how they did.

History is messy… whether it’s in the textbooks or those old family photos lying around the attic.

But it makes us who we are.

And who we are is so important.