"When he drank some of it's wine,he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent."(Genesis 9:21)
Obviously when we are children our parents loom very large in our lives.One or both of them are there,unless we are orphaned,providing all of the necessities of life,all the nurturing and role modeling and provision,all the love that we need.They are there when we speak our first words and when we take our first steps.Nearly everywhere we go we go with one or both of our parents,and we come to know something of their parents and there siblings,we emerge into a family,a community,a society and hopefully attain a sense of belonging.Our parents are,in short,everything,they made us and they continue in their presence or absence to form us,as do,through them our forefathers.
I must confess a level of ignorance that I find disturbing.Memoir is ones own story,a selfie,we would call in today.Still,I find it challenging to proceed without mention of the people who filled my world at each step.Most of them I observed,simply because there was no way not to as I lived out my life.I spent my life watching and listening to them,and have drawn conclusions about them based on all that observation that I never realized I was doing.But who has ever heard the word memoir at the age of four?
To leave out the people who inhabited my world,while I'm trying to make sense of some part of my life would be akin to making a cake and leaving out some important ingredient.Things would no more make sense to me then than they did in the shadowy days of earliest childhood.To not understand my mother or father leaves the story incomplete,and nobody could understand who I am.
In regarding my parents,as I've done for so many years,I find it remarkable that I can draw so few conclusions.In large part,they've both retained a sense of mystery,leaving me with as many unanswered questions as definitive knowings.In just the few chapters I've written,I've come to know,and to present certain knowledge of some of my parents character traits.My father,for instance had a growing family,and in that family he had an intense pride,as did my mother.Both of my parents were good providers,hard workers and family oriented,both to their families of origin and the family they made.You can see the family pride,for instance in the rides we took to the ice cream stand.For my father that was all about being seen,being conspicuous.You can see,for example,my mother's industrious nature in the fact that she was willing to work outside the home in a tuberculosis hospital,ans in that she made butter long after doing so had fallen out of fashion.
But saying all of these things,and many more to come in no way make either of these omni- present persons less of an enigma,though in some sense I know them both well.Nevertheless,I have a great many questions with regard to each of them,and,both of them together.But we were not intended to be all knowing.It is not a good thing to look upon the nakedness of a parent,in the sense of trying to degrade them as a person.To an extent,though that's what we do in constructing a sensible memoir.It doesn't mean that the questions I have are not legitimate,but it is a good thing to allow some of the mystery to exist.
One of the problems with trying to arrive at a consistent picture of any given person,especially one with whom you've spent years with,is that very little can be said to be unchanging,especially anything that lives.Moreover,we change ourselves,so both the reality of a person,and our ability to see and measure reality change over time.Of course,in childhood,that developmental process is most acute in the earliest years.Our parents change more slowly then,but change they do.We all live and learn and the way we see our world and the people in it evolves.So,my father at thirty is not nearly the same as he was at forty.Nor was he likely the same person in Moncton as he was in Goose Bay,or in Springhill.My mother,in Moncton could only have been said to have been from that world of her parents in Dead Creek.You could not say she was still in that world.
Among the things that I wonder about,in regards to my mother:Was there a mystery to living in Dead Creek?How much of it remained unspoken? Why did she adopt a strategy of ignoring the presence of evil?Was that solely for the protection of her children? How did she deal with the problem of evil internally in her everyday life? Why did she never pursue higher academic goals? How well was she really getting along with both of her parents? What was the specific nature of her religious belief,and was it consistent? What were her political convictions? Was she unequally yoked inside her own marriage?Inside her family of origin? How did she make her marriage work?
My father calls forth many questions too,some of them the same,or at least interrelated and some of them extremely different.For instance,what was the state of his health,both physically and mentally?Was he ever really in good health? When did he have his first stroke? Beyond health,how did he relate to where he came from? Does his past contain any secrets? Was he ever being evasive with his wife or other family members? What did he believe in a religious sense?How different was it from what my mother believed,and how did they work out those differences? What did he believe politically? What state did he think the world was in? How different was he at his passing than he was when we were children? How well did their marriage weather the storms of life?And many other things.
In looking back on my early world,It looks like a constructed world.There were things that we were told,and things which we were absolutely sheltered from.But such is as it should be I suppose.In all,I would have to say,that both of my parents were complex,complicated and very real people.Our family under their leadership had a lot of moving parts,and was not always easy to make sense of.Still,of the two,my mother was by far the greater mystery,being,in addition to everything else,so very adaptable.So it was often difficult to know when she was responding naturally and when she was adapting.This was true to the greatest extent in how she taught us of the higher things,relating to God,and how she lived out faith in her own life.Yet it is not true to say my father was of a simpler construction,nor that he had no faith.And these things were becoming more known to me as I was about to enter my fifth year.
Obviously when we are children our parents loom very large in our lives.One or both of them are there,unless we are orphaned,providing all of the necessities of life,all the nurturing and role modeling and provision,all the love that we need.They are there when we speak our first words and when we take our first steps.Nearly everywhere we go we go with one or both of our parents,and we come to know something of their parents and there siblings,we emerge into a family,a community,a society and hopefully attain a sense of belonging.Our parents are,in short,everything,they made us and they continue in their presence or absence to form us,as do,through them our forefathers.
I must confess a level of ignorance that I find disturbing.Memoir is ones own story,a selfie,we would call in today.Still,I find it challenging to proceed without mention of the people who filled my world at each step.Most of them I observed,simply because there was no way not to as I lived out my life.I spent my life watching and listening to them,and have drawn conclusions about them based on all that observation that I never realized I was doing.But who has ever heard the word memoir at the age of four?
To leave out the people who inhabited my world,while I'm trying to make sense of some part of my life would be akin to making a cake and leaving out some important ingredient.Things would no more make sense to me then than they did in the shadowy days of earliest childhood.To not understand my mother or father leaves the story incomplete,and nobody could understand who I am.
In regarding my parents,as I've done for so many years,I find it remarkable that I can draw so few conclusions.In large part,they've both retained a sense of mystery,leaving me with as many unanswered questions as definitive knowings.In just the few chapters I've written,I've come to know,and to present certain knowledge of some of my parents character traits.My father,for instance had a growing family,and in that family he had an intense pride,as did my mother.Both of my parents were good providers,hard workers and family oriented,both to their families of origin and the family they made.You can see the family pride,for instance in the rides we took to the ice cream stand.For my father that was all about being seen,being conspicuous.You can see,for example,my mother's industrious nature in the fact that she was willing to work outside the home in a tuberculosis hospital,ans in that she made butter long after doing so had fallen out of fashion.
But saying all of these things,and many more to come in no way make either of these omni- present persons less of an enigma,though in some sense I know them both well.Nevertheless,I have a great many questions with regard to each of them,and,both of them together.But we were not intended to be all knowing.It is not a good thing to look upon the nakedness of a parent,in the sense of trying to degrade them as a person.To an extent,though that's what we do in constructing a sensible memoir.It doesn't mean that the questions I have are not legitimate,but it is a good thing to allow some of the mystery to exist.
One of the problems with trying to arrive at a consistent picture of any given person,especially one with whom you've spent years with,is that very little can be said to be unchanging,especially anything that lives.Moreover,we change ourselves,so both the reality of a person,and our ability to see and measure reality change over time.Of course,in childhood,that developmental process is most acute in the earliest years.Our parents change more slowly then,but change they do.We all live and learn and the way we see our world and the people in it evolves.So,my father at thirty is not nearly the same as he was at forty.Nor was he likely the same person in Moncton as he was in Goose Bay,or in Springhill.My mother,in Moncton could only have been said to have been from that world of her parents in Dead Creek.You could not say she was still in that world.
Among the things that I wonder about,in regards to my mother:Was there a mystery to living in Dead Creek?How much of it remained unspoken? Why did she adopt a strategy of ignoring the presence of evil?Was that solely for the protection of her children? How did she deal with the problem of evil internally in her everyday life? Why did she never pursue higher academic goals? How well was she really getting along with both of her parents? What was the specific nature of her religious belief,and was it consistent? What were her political convictions? Was she unequally yoked inside her own marriage?Inside her family of origin? How did she make her marriage work?
My father calls forth many questions too,some of them the same,or at least interrelated and some of them extremely different.For instance,what was the state of his health,both physically and mentally?Was he ever really in good health? When did he have his first stroke? Beyond health,how did he relate to where he came from? Does his past contain any secrets? Was he ever being evasive with his wife or other family members? What did he believe in a religious sense?How different was it from what my mother believed,and how did they work out those differences? What did he believe politically? What state did he think the world was in? How different was he at his passing than he was when we were children? How well did their marriage weather the storms of life?And many other things.
In looking back on my early world,It looks like a constructed world.There were things that we were told,and things which we were absolutely sheltered from.But such is as it should be I suppose.In all,I would have to say,that both of my parents were complex,complicated and very real people.Our family under their leadership had a lot of moving parts,and was not always easy to make sense of.Still,of the two,my mother was by far the greater mystery,being,in addition to everything else,so very adaptable.So it was often difficult to know when she was responding naturally and when she was adapting.This was true to the greatest extent in how she taught us of the higher things,relating to God,and how she lived out faith in her own life.Yet it is not true to say my father was of a simpler construction,nor that he had no faith.And these things were becoming more known to me as I was about to enter my fifth year.
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