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Spreading family traditions is a necessary challenge for young mothers

Vaseline

Debra-Lynn B. Hook
| Especially for De Platenkoerier

In many ways I was lucky that my parents were young when I was born. My mother was 19 and my father 22.

Their youth meant that their parents were also relatively young, as were their parents’ parents, which placed me at birth among a host of grandparents and great-grandparents, a tribe of elders whose physical presence would enrich my life for many years to come.

These weren’t nurturing John and Olivia Walton types, mind you. These were hardened life warriors, some of whom crossed oceans for a better life, all of whom survived world wars, the Great Depression, and an era when children were seen and not heard.

I don’t remember getting any hugs from them, nor much intimacy.

Learning from the generations

What I still remember is identity.

I know who I am because of the time I spent in my maternal great-grandmother’s kitchen.

We called her Big Mama. She came to South Carolina from Lebanon at age 15 with a thick accent and a special instinct for making Mediterranean food before Americans knew what an olive was.

While her husband built a grocery empire, Big Mama spent her days preparing grape leaves, tabbouleh and kibbeh for her family and extended relatives in her oversized kitchen, where she had two stoves, two refrigerators and a walk-in pantry from which the aromas wafted. . of the aromatic herbs of her country.

Thanks to Big Mama, I know firsthand why I love cooking, especially ethnic foods, and why a dash of cumin feels like home. I also know something about faith. Big Mama always neglected to attend Catholic mass every morning.

My other great-grandmother, grandmother, also on my mother’s side, could not have been more different. And yet she was the same.

Southern flavors are also a taste of home

Like Big Mama, Grandma cooked food for her people. In her case, it was the people of the South Carolina mill town where she worked and lived. You couldn’t be in Grandma’s house long before she rolled out a batch of buttermilk biscuits to go with a bowl of okra and tomato soup she canned from her garden.

Unlike Big Mama, who wore dresses of Lebanese silk in a large brick house resplendent in rich mahogany furniture and taffeta curtains, Grandma wore a bun at the back of her head and a bonnet. She dipped snuff and lived in a small wooden house with feather mattresses and an outbuilding as a bathroom. Grandma carried the blood of the Cherokee Indian in her veins, which inspired my passion for Native American spirituality and the sacredness of all things.

Here now in Ohio, where we moved 27 years ago, I claim my Southernness most clearly from Grandma, and also from my parents’ parents, who came from Mississippi and South Carolina and carried the drawls and Southern Methodism to the to prove.

I demand from all of them not only a sense of belonging, but also an outright will to survive the hardships of their lives and times.

These people from whom I am descended no longer exist. My last great-grandparent died when I was 25, my remaining grandparent ten years later. My parents are no longer here, my father from colon cancer at the age of 57, my mother from a household accident when she was 68.

Working to cherish family traditions

I miss their physical presence for myself.

I also miss it for my children, who never got to experience the rich cultures and older ancestors whose being tells them who they are.

In a fragmented world where the sense of belonging is becoming an enormous challenge, I believe it is becoming increasingly important to connect with identity and primal power. That’s why I always took my kids south when possible for a family vacation.

Deep in my mother’s soul, I know that knowing who they are and how they got here is critical to the well-being of my children.

And that’s how I maintain relationships with my three sisters and my cousins. On special occasions, I bring out my mother’s dishes and explain to my children, probably ad nauseum, how they were used in previous lives. I create and teach the recipes of our common ancestors and explain their history as best I can.

Of course it can’t be the same. There is no substitute for the feelings I felt as I sat in Big Mama’s kitchen as she rolled the grape leaves, speaking to my mother and grandmother in the thick accent of the Old Country.

Just being in the presence of Big Mama’s power gave me so much of me.

And now my children know everything they know about this from me.

It can sometimes feel like a huge responsibility.

Either way, it has to be enough to produce the power and the stories.

Which, with the breath of the ancestors behind us, will happen.

Kent journalist Debra-Lynn B. Hook has been writing about family life since 1988, when she was pregnant with the first of her three children. Emails are welcome at [email protected].

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