27 July 06
Morphologies
One of the most interesting things about this past weekend and my enounters with distant cousins was a kind of horror in recognition. Yes, those are my earlobes. Yes, lots of other women in this family went gray at 28 and some of them, like me, stopped dyeing their hair a while ago. Yes, lots of us have crooked lower front teeth despite the best efforts of orthodontists to convince the world to the contrary.
Kinship systems are a field of anthropology and often include, by definition, systems of taboo. What, then, to make of the disowned sisters, one of whom was my grandmother, who each married “wrong” and who caused great scandal, some of it still the subject 70 years later of whispered giggles (hardly so weird; an allegation of an affair between my grandmother and her brother-in-law). But his son, the great sire: 8 children in wedlock, at least another three, but who knows in fact how many else, out of it. And, ladies and gentlemen, some of them were there, along with both ex-wives. It was an amazing gathering, with the backdrop of the hurricane outside.
Genealogy programs tend to be written by and for mormons and exclude gedcom categories like “natural daughter” or “lesbian couple with three children, all with same biological father from sperm bank.” Kinship systems need to catch up, and so do the genealogy codewriters. Those of us needing to record such kinship systems must muddle through on our own, but I guess for the first time I’ve felt really proud to be part of this family. And this, from my mother, walking barefoot through St. David’s cemetery on Sunday: “I think I’ve finally trampled out the terror of this family.” (That, alone, was worth the trip for me.)
I arrived home to a blistering heatwave and some interesting vegetables. I have no idea what this is. It’s in the Armenian cucumber patch but it looks like it got crossed with a honeydew melon.
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We should all sit over a cold one, one of these days, and swap family stories. Joe has some good ones and I have some that are good in completely different ways. I promise you’ll laugh.
Chances of my family’s ever having a gathering like yours are slim, as at least half are of the never-speak-to-X-again sort. Come to think of it, that’s an offshoot of the tendency Not To Talk About things. It’s amazing what I don’t know about my kin just a generation or two back.
And I’d love to chat with your mother sometime (surely she’ll come out to visit?) about “the terror.” I have a feeling my own mother felt similarly about parts of her birth and (especially) in-law families.
I’ve been thinking about starting a Sullivan wiki somewhere, just for my rellies. Password-protected. Just ‘cause there’s all this stuff, this history, we don’t know about each other, even—I mean siblings, not just cousins.
Karen