Ever since I was young, I’ve been the caretaker of the family history, a mix of centuries old secrets and artifacts. My parents each split off from their families and moved west carrying with them ancestral ties bound together by lies, trauma, substance abuse and dark histories held close to the chest. These ties were not only through tales and things but also through genetic vulnerabilities, predispositions and cracks in their emotional structures. I believe that most families exist in this fashion. With centuries, maybe millennia, of experiential cycles behind them, a family is truly the sum of its parts. Since I was the only child, curating became my responsibility by default.

“my mom did it to her mom and her mom did it to her mom all the way back to eve” – V. by Thomas Pynchon. 

On my mom’s side there is history, pride, provenance and the accumulation of wealth over time. There are the tales that were kept in the darkness of the ancestor who ran away from the battlefield in the War of 1812, came home to Pennsylvania,was caught by the Army, and promptly executed in the front yard. His room was bricked up with all of his stuff inside. He remains nameless to this day and is not spoken about. There are the tales of incest and the survivors, and the stoic public faces hiding the horrors found in private. My challenges started there, the legacy of private suffering and the public show of perfect families. I was taught to never speak one’s discomfort lest it upset the apple cart. My great grandfather’s penchants hurt his family to its core but the family chose to support him instead of his victims. We didn’t talk about those things so they continued and the damage done left another generation vulnerable to more of the same. Boundaries were for social strata and outsiders. Boundaries are very important now and there will be no sweeping things under the rug. Pride does a lot of damage, especially when it’s used as a lever.

“my mom did it to her mom and her mom did it to her mom all the way back to eve” – V. by Thomas Pynchon. 

The other part of the heritage with a family that focuses on legacies was the need to keep everything. It’s been 5 years since my mother passed. I have been sorting and clearing steadily for all 5 of those years. I’ve had to pick and choose and I still have too much that neither I nor my children want. She had her mother’s stuff and her mother had her mother’s stuff, and her mother had her mother’s stuff and now it’s all my stuff. I am breaking the chains of that tradition and will be keeping only the items that I like. Some will go back to the family because they’re legacy pieces and some, my grandmother’s linen towel collection for example, that will be used for their intended purposes while others will be sold. In my family, stuff was more important than children, more important than pets, and more important than it had any right to be. It’s been a very hard habit to break. I often feel guilty for not keeping family heirlooms and I have to remind myself that I have them because no one else in the family wanted them. They just put on a good act being their dutiful selves.

“The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.” – William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

My father’s side was a bit different. There wasn’t a focus on family legacy or pride. They didn’t wish to speak on the family background at all. But they filled that empty space with wrath, cruelty, violence, substance abuse and racism. The challenges here have been easier to spot since society frowns – until recently – on most of them. My religious upbringing certainly pointed them out to me as well. The largest group of my father’s items that I had to clear were his firearms. He had them tucked anywhere and everywhere. I did manage to find them all and they were sold to one of his neighbors. But with him, his family had left him a legacy of abuse that he rarely talked about and due to those early wounds he settled into familiar patterns that continued that legacy. There are only unconfirmed rumours about how atrocious his upbringing was, yet knowing the family and seeing the resulting bitterness in his heart, I am reasonably sure that the rumours were true. I had to learn to forgive and let go with him.

“The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.” – William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Substance abuse was all around throughout my childhood and I had a moment of clarity when I realized how prevalent it was in my father’s family. One of my great aunts made bath tub gin during prohibition and a great uncle ran bootleg hauls to and from Canada. Another uncle ran a bar in Santa Monica, and different aunt was married to a pharmacist who prescribed meds under the counter. That aunt got me in trouble by leaving a whole stash of empty airport miniature bottles under my bed. I’m not sure why she thought we wouldn’t notice because when she stayed overnight, she slept in my room and I slept elsewhere. While we were often too poor to buy store made clothes, or a pass to the local zoo, we always had a full bar at home. Alcohol was integral to any and all activities. Most of my relatives on my father’s side were alcoholics. They had lost legs and children to alcohol. My challenge was to make a different path. I started by making a rule that I didn’t drink unless I was in a very good mood. I joked for years that I hadn’t had a drink in 20 years because of that vow. In reality I have had a couple because I enjoyed the taste but I still don’t get drunk, or even tipsy due to the family history. I’ve made sure my children understood the problematic legacy of our fathers and how bad it can be for those around an alcoholic.

The racism and violence flowed together with the alcohol and the wrath. None of these are allowed in my home. I didn’t learn to tell jokes because the only jokes I saw were cruel and I didn’t want to be cruel, so it was better to be quiet. I am currently working on learning to write jokes that don’t base their humor on denigration or the harmful exploitation of cruelty for a laugh. If that sounds woke, maybe it is, but it’s certainly a lot harder than going for the easy insult. Challenges come in all shapes and sizes. But I think that most of them are inherited. Most of us seem to be trying to be better than our parents were. I’m pretty sure my parents were trying to be better than their parent were. I hope we can keep succeeding.