Thinking...

It may seem ridiculous at “my age” to be trying to figure out “who I am,” (sorry to leap immediately into the overused cliché of adolescence), but a combination of recent influences has left me with a lingering surface uneasiness that I may not actually know what I am. Setting aside the more overt questions like “Who am I?” and “What is my purpose in life?” (there are some really interesting and inspiring answers to these questions on my church’s website), I want to know why I am the way I am. Moot as this point may be, given that my children hopefully inherited my egotistical determination that I WILL be whatever/whomever I choose, I have still thought long and hard about the people I hope my children will become, and how to parent them best so that they actually have a chance to be those people. Centuries ago, there were people strewn across the british isles (we can trace most lines back to the 17th century to Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Suffolk, England) living their lives, raising their families, and making the kind of decisions that while merely life-altering to them, were so monumental in the grand scheme of things that looking back I can only gape and wonder at where they got the nerve. John Rencher was born in 1712 in Ireland, but his son John Grant was born in Raleigh, NC in 1750. He probably left his homeland during or after the famine in 1740. I wonder if he resolved to spare himself and his progeny cold and hunger. That we know of, there were at least 3 generations of Renchers (probably Renshaws) who had lived successively in the same place in Ireland, likely many more. Were they in favor with the British occupiers? Was his flight an escape from some unknowable political conflict? What can he have thought of North Carolina when he arrived? He MUST have wondered if he would ever be COOL again. On and on it goes, my grandmother’s line arrives much later in America, sometime between 1831 and 1873, while the Stewart line, (my mother’s) abandoned Scotland between 1650 and 1674, when my 7-times great-grandfather was born in North Carolina (again North Carolina!). They completely missed the uprisings! I wonder what flaws of character they might have passed on to me—or strengths, if I have any. I wish I knew more about them than can be represented by the date and place of birth and death, although I am grateful for that, of course. I believe that one way to make my life more than just a b.1972, UT, USA is somehow to infuse in my children whatever good I have in me. The thing I am trying so clumsily to articulate is that I don’t know what was given me by the confluence of destiny that is my family heritage, and how the heck to pass it on.