The Generational Thing...

This is how I see the generations in my family: Over the generations, the women in our family (I say women because my family seems to have been a matriarchy or at least that's how I've always thought of it) seem to build upon the things they learned from their mothers, grandmothers, aunts to become a new and improved version of the prior generation. So, my Mother taught me some useful things: She taught me to stand up for myself and not to automatically defer to "authority". She taught me that family is everything. She taught me to sew. And, most important, my mother taught me that I could do anything. I don't mean unrealistic, stupid things. I mean, she taught me that if I want to learn how to do something, then the way to go about it is to just do it!

Of course, nowadays the Internet makes it much easier to learn how to do things. But back in the '50s and '60s, Mom just figured it out for herself. I'd come home from school and there was Mom, sitting at the dining table, carving little birds out of soap and painting them with nail polish. Or, one day when she and I were walking home from the market (she didn't drive), we found sheets of this pretty pink stuff next to someone's garbage. We didn't know what it was, but we knew we could make something out of it. So, we gathered it up in our arms and took it home. Turned out that it was fiberglass sheeting. We were picking fiberglass shards out of our red, swollen arms for days.

For his part, Dad could fix anything. If the washing machine broke, we'd send Dad downstairs to take it apart. We never called repairmen. I remember my Dad with wrenches and hammers spread out around him and the washing machine in pieces on the floor. But he always fixed it.

So, in a family like this, we grew up with the attitude that nothing was impossible to do - nothing too hard; if you didn't know how to do something, you'd just figure it out, trial and error.

To this day it cracks me up when someone asks me "How did you learn to do that?" when they see my paintings or ceramics or even the painted wall treatments in my home. I just shrug my shoulders and say "I just do it." Makes it hard to buy things that other people have made. I'm always looking at things and saying "I can make that myself."

So, as I was saying, I am the next evolution of my Mom and my Daughter is, as I see it, a new and improved version of the women she hails from. Maybe a smarter, savvier me. Or maybe just herself. I like to think that some of her smartness and savviness are genetic, from the long line of women in my family...Oh, by the way, my brother and my son also picked up the "womanly" wisdom in the family, it seems.

Now I see my Granddaughter showing signs of being part of the tribe as well...