Extended Family

My Grandmama Dobbs spent much of the 1940s and 50s gestating, nursing or birthing babies. She had six children: boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, girl. My Mom was the 4th born (2nd girl). Those 6 children married and produced 12 grandchildren. So far, those 12 (plus three gained by marriage) have produced 13 great-grandchildren spread across 6 states. That's an awful lot of family as a result of she and my late Granddaddy falling in love.

Because I grew up on a family compound of sorts, my extended family has always been known to me. Even though I have moved away, it remains important to me for my children to have a connection to our big extended family.

Today we traveled to Lake Harding (outside Opelika, AL) to visit with two of my cousins who were in town from New Mexico and Missouri. It was a blessing to see my Grandmama enjoying 4 of her 5 living children and all but 3 of her 12 grandchildren together in one place. (It almost made me forget it was 95 degrees outside!) It is quite an eclectic group-- from all different walks of life--but our shared history lends itself to a comfortable feeling of being a part of something much larger than ourselves.

Author Kendall Hailey describes it this way: "The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you."

This afternoon, sitting around the pool, I thought about all the common stories I have with these people through 36 years of living--how much we have all been through since our childhood days of fig fights, climbing magnolias, hide and seek after dark, swimming and being together at my Grandmama's house. They are touchstones to various chapters of my life.

The mood stays light. There is friendly (sarcastic) banter. Most things, frankly, stay completely unspoken, for as family, we just understand them of one another. No explanation is necessary.

Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family. ~Anthony Brandt

In this culture of online connections, career mobility and fractured family relationships, I fear that the idea of 'knowing' extended family feels outdated. Even though my children are too young to understand, it is important for me to recreate some of these same opportunities for them. I want them to feel the security that comes with roots.

I loved this quote I came across tonight from Pearl S. Buck.

"The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born."