Reflections of an Ordinary Life

I am new to blogging. I've been considering dipping my big toe in its unknown waters for some time now, but I always have to wonder: who will read this? who will care? And yet, the lure of blogging--the fascination of it--just won't go away, so here I am. My first blog. You lucky reader, you!

Let me tell you the purpose of this blog. For about 15 years I have been researching my family's history. Now quickly--before your eye glaze over in tedious boredom--let me assure you that this is NOT a blog to publish my genealogical research. Far from it. Instead, it is going to deal with a far more mundane and probably boring subject: my life. So if you're not one of those who like to "peak in" on your neighbors, just to see what they're up to, feel free to check out now. (Myself, I can never resist doing a bit of spying on co-workers or neighbors.) But, the point I am belaboring to make is this: if it were not for my genealogical research, I probably would never have been motivated to set down my own life's story. So genealogy is the root of this blog, if not its actual subject.

As I sit down to write these memoirs (such a pretentious word), I wonder who my audience might be and who might even care. I’ve worked long and hard on researching my family's history. I even started a website in order to record the “roots” of my family. I’ve traced back my ancestors through the last two centuries, marked the places of their births on maps, and gleaned what little facts I could about their lives from old pictures and history books. I believe there is great value in preserving my family’s past, and I hope my efforts will endure and be well received by future generations.

But to include my own reflections--a letter, of sorts, from me to you--isn't that a bit narcissistic? Suppose I do set down my recollections of growing up in Houston, Texas in the 1960’s—who besides my immediate family would be interested in that? My life has been pretty ordinary, and I’ve not made any great accomplishments. No, my life has not been all that exciting usually, and really, who would want to read about it anyway?

But I’ll tell you something I have learned. During my research, I have read the letters and journals of pioneer women who, at the end of a fourteen-hour day of grueling labor, somehow found the strength to set down a few lines each evening by flickering firelight about their day. And the value of those antiquated records lies not in the dazzling or exciting tales of an adventurous life on the western frontier. No, the value lies in the very ordinary details of a life lived honestly, often times tragically, but with human strength and dignity.

These women with their work-worn hands and oft-mended calico gowns wrote tenderly of their children—their first smiles, their beauty and grace. They railed against diseases they could not fight and grieved when the battle was lost. Sometimes their writings were comic: daily struggles with mud puddles on dirt floors, exploding stovepipes, and piglets multiplying under the porch. They recorded their recipes for laundry soap and beeswax candles and dried raisin pies. They wrote because they were isolated in their little sod huts and had no girlfriends to have coffee with every morning at work. They wrote because somehow they knew that as short and as hard and as futile as their lives must have seemed at times, one day their children, and their children’s children, would come to know them through their words. They left us a love letter from the past.

What would we give if we could catch a glimpse into our great-grandmothers' lives? How fascinating it would be if we could know more about them than just their date of birth or the number of children they had? When I look at some of the women in my family who were married at thirteen, bore twelve children, moved five times, and still lived to be eighty, I yearn to be able to talk to them. What must their lives have been like?

Were they happy? Did they find joy in their lives? Did they long for something different? Did they have dreams and aspirations beyond marriage and family? Did they secretly shudder with fear every other year when, just as they weaned one child, they found themselves nauseous, exhausted and tied down by yet another pregnancy again? Did they resent their husbands for the inevitable result of their conjungal relations? Or did they--having no choice other than abstinence--just accept the perils and dangers of multiple pregnancies as part of their lives and go on? Were they so worn down by endless work and worry that they had no energy for love or laughter? Or did they love life passionately and look forward to the start of each new day with a bright smile and hope in their hearts?

And where did they find the sheer courage it must have taken for them to pack up and move their children and household belongings and livestock hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles, over unknown lands and seas in search of a better life?

Don’t you wish they had written us a letter?

So I have come to realize that’s what I want to do: I want to write a letter. I want to write about the good and the bad, the happy and the tragic, the ordinary and the sublime. I want to open a window and let you all have a glimpse into the life of an ordinary woman who lived and worked and loved and died, and whose memory will fade into obscurity just as surely as the tides will continue to turn. I will be mourned by my family, but then forgotten by all, just one more statistic in a time line that marches down through the ages, unless I allow you to know me through the words on these few pages.

Most of us will never earn a place in the history books, and yet all of us contribute in our own way to the legacy of man. Is my life worth a moment or two of reflection by some future generation? Only time will tell. But I write this love letter for my children, and my children’s children, and if by some happenstance, these words should survive beyond that time, then I write it for all of those who might one day yearn for glimpse, just a glimmer really, of what ordinary life was like "back then" in America. And maybe, just maybe, some of those future readers will be inspired to write their own love letters to their own children. And in this way, the reflections of ordinary people upon their ordinary lives will continue to be woven, in and out, among the threads of the too seldom recorded history of the common man.