Playing the hand we’re dealt

Earlier in my midlife journey, I explored my past by climbing my family tree. Having researched my roots and explored the branches that extended well beyond my personal family memories, I was able to piece together a colorful past from the public records and pictures permanently etched into our history. So when an aunt asked me how she could learn more about her family’s ancestry, I was quick to offer my assistance. However, I also shared with her that in my search, I found evidence not only of the heartwarming reunions and pictures of significant life moments, but of harsh times and likely social drama that altered how I viewed my ancestors and their lives. As my aunt had been raised in difficult times, she assured me that anything she learned would be better than not knowing more about from where she came.

This search took me on a journey of self-reflection to evaluate how I’d learned to forge ahead in spite of difficult, trying times. My early years were filled with photo albums, but life can never truly be captured in a perfect photo. When I was sorting memorabilia from my great-grandparents, I found wedding announcements, baby pictures, and records to match my shared family stories. What I had not expected to piece together was a timeline of events very different than what I’d come to learn over the years. A shotgun “pretend” wedding, a journey to another state, a documented, “official” wedding, and a baby born two months later. The story of hardship and misfortune of another set of grandparents was evident amidst census records and letters about heading west during the Great Depression. Stories like these, the ones that were not shared but left in the records for those who needed to find them, depicted real life and all that went with it. Dealing with the hands they were dealt, our family fought against the forces that would keep them down and keep them apart. Lessons in strength and faith, for sure.

The ugly, uncomfortable history and the lessons we learn from our past have to be available, documented, and shared. We need to see not only the weddings and the funerals, but also the violence, the discrimination and the justice, so we may all understand how we overcame challenges like poverty, oppression, and hate. Seeing it all doesn’t expose our hand in this card game of life. What it does is strengthen the odds of winning with each deal of the cards. For me, looking at my past filled with lessons is what allows me to live my present.

I will eventually share my findings with my aunt. The struggle to stay rooted in hope for better times is how I am playing this hand I am dealt. Lately, seeing the world around me being disassembled to reshape the lessons I learned from my ancestors is scary. I remain playing the game, but I have NO KINGS in the hand I was dealt and I’m ok with that.

A last goodbye

Someone close to me died recently. She had filled her life with love and fun and upheaval and all the things that create one’s personal story. She fought valiantly to hold on to the life she’d made, and when she said her last goodbye, we mourned the empty space in our lives that was filled with this person and all she was. While the circle of life continued, we paused to reflect on our own.

When you’re young, life seems to be a race with the prize at the end of it, promising the feeling of success and gratitude. The walking stick we carry as we journey could be our faith, or simply our plan, and it helps us pace our effort, steady us in troubled times, or measure out our achievements in all we set out for ourselves. However, by the time midlife approaches, we seem to look ahead with less intensity and look back more to what we’ve ezperienced along the way. The well-paying job is no longer the proud accomplishment of a young professional but a means to an end to support family and friends in need. The lean and fit body achieved at the gym is no longer a testament to devotion to one’s health as it is more the promise given to loved ones. The value of being present for years to come is worth more than the immediate satisfaction of the weekend party. The young are writing their story, but at what point did I shift from looking forward to all I had yet to do, to looking back to all that I had not done?

Death can come at any time, and regret is a terrible thing – a constant reminder of the road not taken. However, it is the people in your life who eventually become the measure of one’s success, the chapters in your story. The pictures at the memorial service shared a life filled with challenge, fun times, and love. Our recent family loss made me wonder how I would be remembered by others, and how my story would be told. I wept, understanding that the loss I felt was being shared by so many others.

This journey to mindfulness has been instrumental to me, allowing me to release many of the earlier expectations I had placed for myself. In midlife – I love differently, trying to accept more of what is and letting go of what may never be. I shift my personal perspective from one of overachiever to one of memory maker. Finally embracing the story I’d written until now, I love myself more. This self-acceptance will allow me to fail less and accomplish more.

Death and inevitability is not easy. Learning that while moments in life may be a constant, how you look at them can change. At some point I too will say my last goodbye, and hope that my history will have been written into the hearts of those who are left behind.

The ghost in the machine

The holiday season always evokes that feeling of sparkle and adventure in me. While my household no longer holds the children who come and go, I look forward to the time when I can host my friends and families in my home or within the festiveness of the city. Being an empty nester has allowed me to grow as an explorer, becoming brave enough to leave my cozy home base during the darker season to engage the world around me with those whom I hold dear. Mindfulness for me during this season of sentimentality is about really seeing the people I’m with, relishing the moment, and helping to create that joy in all we are during this time.

So it was my holiday endeavor to share with my children my memories of days gone past in a way that conveyed the stories they were too young to remember. Photographs presented still life moments of special times, but on video I captured first words, first steps, and first missing teeth. Holidays and birthdays were recorded in documentarian style, knowing even back then that these days would become self-evident in the journey my children were taking. Giddy in my excitement of receiving the final product of this Christmas endeavor, I also expected a trip down memory lane with the extra features of this conversion. Among the multitude of recordings I had provided were mystery cartons and boxes I had never viewed. It was unclear how far back this digital journey would take me.

My goal was to share our family story with the next generations. Would these cannisters of celluloid give my family a sense of history like old Polaroids never could? I clicked on the first icon, seeing a 1951 parade and then the Rose Bowl football game. Numerous captured moments of Central California history, of which John Steinbeck might even be proud. Grainy, silent moments in the time of my family’s past filled my screen. As I watched, I saw the entrance of a young California rancher and his wife, who was dressed in a starched blouse and full skirt. As the camera set on a tall, slim, dark haired beauty of a girl, maybe 14 years old, I stopped because I was looking at a reflection of myself. My mother had appeared in frame, in a setting that took me back to my childhood. The setting of my favorite Christmas memories. This was my mother, smiling, walking, and laughing in her childhood home.

Because my daughters would grow up not seeing my side of the family very often, I wove the fondest of my childhood memories into their daily course of living. Tales of the ranch, the sprawling patio on which my sister and I rollerskated, along the midcentury splendour of Christmas in California with Grammy and Granddad likely fell short on the ears of little girls. But now, there was video to back every story I’d told them.

This shift in my personal timeline stopped me in my tracks. It was like seeing myself, but not myself, filmed in a family story I knew little about. It was like seeing a ghost – the ghost in this machine was forcing me to rewrite everything I knew about my early life. How could there be so much I did not know about my mother and who would eventually become my father?

Seeing my young mother with her grandparents and cousins and little brother camping among the 1950s Sequoias expanded my family story in a way nothing else could. Like bellows on a fire, this richness of my ancestry had blown life into my identity in a way only personal history could. Like that grandfather telling that same story over and over at the dinner table, I now had added depth of who I was and from whence I came to the mother…to the person I’d become for my children. The life I had crafted from the experiences as I remembered them became more layered, more vibrant with each roll of film I viewed. Mindful of my past but remembering to live in my moments, I realized that these digital ghosts did not haunt my present, but made it richer. I now approach the new year with a confidence that is grounded, like the roots of those Sequoias, in the foundation of our generations reaching for the skies as I grow.

The box of my remains

I had pulled out the storage containers of my childhood belongings. My scrapbooks were filled with greeting cards and family photos, my yearbooks and other items all documented the history of how I came to be. With my divorced parents both now gone, all these things contained significance for me, because it told the world how I lived to become who I now am. When my mother was young, a house fire destroyed many of her baby and childhood things, about which I would later feel such sorrow. As I married and became a parent, I felt the necessity to store the artifacts of both my life and the lives of my children. Even a house fire of my own, in which I was fortunate enough not to lose all of my mementos, could not deter my personal mission of becoming my family historian. I learned how precious a past can be when the world is filled with many things that can rob you of proof that you once lived an incredible life.

Now that my children had grown up and moved out, the mantle of responsibility lightened for me. I was able to share more of myself as a person, and not just as a mother. The more books and boxes I gave to my children, the freer I became. Unbound by the ties that kept me in the role of motherhood, I now tethered myself to my passions – who I loved, what I cherished, and what I did for the others in my life. Clear shelves, empty containers – but one box remained. Filled with random trinkets and buttons and poems, it was what was left of the past. No captioned photos or evidence of a life – just stories that spilled out like someone who’d just been cured of amnesia. I could run my fingers gently over these buttons, coins and ribbons immediately recalling who had done what, the smell of her perfume, or the fear in their eyes. No one but me could appreciate the sentiment each of the tokens could evoke.

So, while my children can now share their past with their children, I have become the storyteller for my grandchildren, pulling tales from what I’ve saved of myself – the small box of my remains. I can appreciate what I have become, so that I can give what I now am to my family: A bigger dreamer, a better mother and wife, and an empowered woman unafraid of what lies ahead.

Who will tell my story?

Just recently was the anniversary of my mother’s death. It’s been six years since she passed away in my home town. We had lived apart, almost 2,000 miles apart, and while technology made it seem closer, it was not close enough. She had become unable to travel and I was still in full-time parent mode. However, as she had more time to visit with me in her retirement years, I was able get to know more about her time as a mother of girls and even a little as a young girl herself. Between the stories of aches and pains of senior life and drama she lived with distant family and her residential facility friends, she occasionally shared a recollection of a time I knew little or nothing about – her youth.

After her death, my sister and I took time to study the few remaining pieces of her life she’d left behind with us. Since moving to an assisted living facility and having to sell her home, it was clear that she had to let go of the identity she had once created for herself as wife, teacher, mother, homeowner, and grandmother. In this new setting and for the years that followed, my mother evolved – or maybe devolved – into the life she led until her death. Now, in a few boxes, what remained of her was given to us to discover.

What we found in these boxes was a woman we barely knew. Instead of the conservative woman who shied away from risk, we found an adventurer. Someone who was a leader, a success within any community she engaged. Someone who, as a young girl from a tiny farming community, fished and camped in the Redwoods. As a teacher fresh out of college, she went to the Far East to travel and teach to young children with military families. We discovered lapel pins and class photos and evidence of her travels to exotic places. We felt sad that the woman we had come to know in death was not the woman we knew in life.

Those of you who follow this journey of mine into midlife have heard my stories of decluttering my life and focusing on the present. Instead of what had become a routine of schedules and sacrifice, I am focusing more on enjoying my life as it unfolds and living an authentic life built not only on the past but the present. As I read between the lines of my mother’s belongings, I was saddened to conclude that we, as a family, had been unsuccessful in helping her tell her story. Instead of celebrating who she was with us, she had put it in the past and lived a life she felt she should – a life of obligation. Where was this carefree girl fishing in the river? Exploring her world? Leading the charge of those around her? Why were we left with a feeling that we didn’t genuinely know the wonderful person she was? How different would our lives have been had this woman had been more a part of our lives?

My father, who had become estranged from our family after the divorce, led a very troubled and lonely life. In death a couple years later, he left no one behind to share his story. My decluttering of my parents belongings and other collected items allowed me to reminisce through the artifacts of my personal history. This gave me pause to think about my life and how I want to be remembered when I am no longer here to tell MY story. Some will ask, why does it matter? You will be gone and it will no longer affect you. After much reflection, I have concluded it matters to me because I want to be remembered. I want my story to be woven into the fabric of my “people” and their collective hearts. Being remembered gives your love and the life you lead purpose.

Nowadays, with social media, people who really don’t know you well may only know what you share via your streams of posts and tweets. The duality of crafting your public story versus living your private one has become the reality of today’s generation. I wholeheartedly believe that we owe it to ourselves to tell our own story. I derive my strength and inspiration from the string of events that are mine and mine alone. All the good and the bad moments have made me who I am and I want my people to know every bit of it. What about you? What of your life gives you purpose? How will others tell your story?