April 3, 2008

• Breaking with Tradition

  The strongest tradition in my family appears to be one of consciously breaking with tradition.  We had been families of farmers, on both maternal and paternal branches of the tree, at the time of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression during my parents’ and grandparents’ lifetimes, when most of them left the farms and went to work in cities.  Very few remained on the land, and few of the offspring of the ones who migrated to the cities ever tried to go back to the land.

  In the fourth generation back, in both maternal and paternal lines, there are Native American Grandmothers.  Two of my great-great-grandmothers, one of the Hunkpapa tribe of the Lakota nation, and the other reputedly Cherokee but possibly Comanche, broke with their traditions and married Americans of European descent.  Their halfbreed children had such a rough time of it, ostracized by both the Anglos and the Indians, that their children, my grandparents, denied their Native heritage and passed for white.

  Seven generations back on my father’s side, and six generations back on my mother’s side, my genealogically inclined cousins have been able to track down men who arrived in America from Europe.  They so thoroughly cut their ties with their homelands that none of us has been able to trace our roots farther back.

  My mother’s family had a tradition of women dying in childbirth, from which my mother and I were pleased to have broken.  From somewhere, either from a German ancestor on my father’s side or from popular culture, my parents got the tradition of Christmas trees.  I have broken with that, and my son sees no point in trying to continue it.  My parents carried on, from some remote source or sources, a number of practices related to making wishes:  wishing wells, wishing on a star, breaking a turkey’s wishbone, etc.  That kind of tradition had horrendous, emotionally-crippling repercussions for me, and I did not inflict it on my children.

  I asked my son if he could think of anything learned or inherited from me or from his father that he would consider a family tradition.  He said he couldn’t think of any.  Then I asked him if any of the routines or practices we do have enough value or significance to him so that he would want to turn them into traditions.  He said, “no,” to that.  I dug a little deeper and learned that he has already retold stories that were passed on to him by me, so it seems that the bardic storytelling tradition might be the only one, besides the practical ones born of generations of poverty, of conserving, fixing things, and making do, to survive beyond his generation and mine.

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  This is my entry for the Featured Grownups challenge:  Family Traditions.
  

  • 2:26 pm
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