Williamston, MI
One of the direst consequences of that great American Affliction known as hypermobility is that many parents—and I am one of them—must raise their children in the absence of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Familial ties are so attenuated, and familial influences so muted, that children scarcely know who they are, much less where they are.
Family reunions must certainly be meaningless—and often excruciating— for men and women who as children did not know their cousins and rarely saw their uncles and aunts.
“So. Where exactly are you now? And what is it you do?”
That familial ties and influences can be problematic I fully acknowledge, but this means only that a parent’s quotidian task of debriefing a child is endless. I suppose that I am not so different from many other people my age in not sharing the views—or many of them, anyway—of the kinfolk and the in-laws.
For example, I do not hook myself up each night to a Fox News I-V drip. (Doing so, near as I can tell, means you have given up on your country, your state, your county, your town, and the people you claim to love.)
But I do think it is a great loss that so many people—and they are usually considered very “successful”—raise their children in the absence of their extended families. They are raising the orphans of success. Many of us are raising orphans of success. I am raising orphans of success.
And I expect the consequences of this to be more devastating than we’ve yet imagined. It is unlikely (to instance but one small consequence) that my children will know their uncles as I have known mine, and this will certainly mean that their knowledge of their grandfather will also be limited.
Zum Beispiel (as my German ancestors used to say): it was a great pleasure for me to share a cigar, a bourbon, a few jokes, and several stories about my grandfather with my dad and his older brother recently. What I know about my grandfather, who died when I was a boy, has been significantly shaped by the told stories that I am the lucky heir to, not a few of which come from my uncles.
But whether my own sons will ever have this experience with me and my brother remains to be seen, and so it is not entirely clear to me that they will know their grandfather through the same or similar forms of mediation.
My brother is far away, and one branch of the armed forces has done an exemplary job of keeping him loyal to a great and (to my way of thinking) inimical abstraction. His considerable talent, like my inconsiderable one, was need elsewhere, and elsewhere we went. I don’t know his kids; he doesn’t know mine. But we have “careers.”
And what about all those others who are indentured to the same abstraction, a monster clever enough to know that if you move a man every two years he’ll swear his fealty not to any place but to an uncle known as “Sam”? Sam I Am. The new Great I Am.
“Sam,” who has never smoked a cigar. “Sam,” who has never sipped a bourbon or told a joke. “Sam,” who had no father or grandfather. “ Sam,” who never built his own milk house or walked behind a team.
He hath not eyes. If you prick him he will not bleed. But still he Wants You.
And he’s got you. He’s got us. (He’s filled his body bags with us.)
Of course I will be told that the market compensates us for all this.
My response is that anyone who falls for such a ruse is a few evolutionary stages shy of homo sapiens. A very competitive job market, not to mention profound personal weakness, took my wife and me away from our parents (it took our siblings away too), and now our parents, all four of them in their seventies, must be wondering who will look after them in the coming years, which, as aging has taught them (and as it teaches all of us), are going to be more difficult than the previous years.
My espoused saint and I have attempted to compensate—or should I say atone?—for our leaving by letting our children spend most of their summers with their grandparents. The geographic radius is small (four miles), and other cousins come and go in such frequency as to allow for more intimacy than we could otherwise hope for. In the last two years we have attended two family reunions that, thanks to the fact that a less devastating version of mobility blasted our parents’ generation, were not at all excruciating. They were in fact a great joy, though several of those in attendance, most of them my age, had assembled from the four corners of the globe. I mean that.
And of course both events were possible because of the ready availability of the very thing that enabled us to scatter in the first place: cheap oil. It also absolved us by promising to bring us back for reunions that wouldn’t have been necessary had we never scattered in the first place—reunions that end with the exchange of e-mail addresses and the scattering to the corners.
All of which I abominate.
But what I love is seeing my children climb trees, shoot arrows, build rafts, and sleep in tents with their cousins. I love seeing them ride the John Deeres with their grandfathers. I love hearing their grandmothers read to them. I love seeing them sit at a big ancestral table, not only eating but also interacting with all the generations represented there. I love hearing them ask, “may I please be excused?” And I love seeing them rocket from the table for more tree-climbing and B-B gun practice.
And I also feel their grief at the close of summer. We live in a neighborhood where the children are loved, and we move among people who love them, just as we in our way essay to love the children around us. But we all know—and the children know better than all of us—that the quality of love in a neighborhood differs from the quality of love in a family.
And that, it seems to me, is what most devastates the children. They can’t really tell you what love is, but they know what it means to experience the greater and lesser versions of it.
As this piece “goes live” and meets with the limited interest—not to mention the unlimited disinterest—it deserves, I will have completed the several needed tasks at the various homesteads: repairs to mowers and tractors and to the plumbing. I will have felled and pruned the trees that needed felling and pruning. And I will be headed “home,” borne on the wings of cheap and quickly-vanishing oil, my quiver full enough of children, each sitting for an ungodly amount of time in his or her appointed measure of grief and sorrow.
That is, in a car seat, strapped in a seat-belt, each seeing the world at mechanical speed.
And I’ll hear the familiar plaintive question: “Why can’t we live there all the time?”
We could, of course. Except that Mom and Dad were blasted by the great American Affliction.
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
JP,
Count me as one of those with an interest in this piece, particularly as it relates to the kinds of love and connectedness we cultivate within our children. Having lived the peripatetic academic life myself, before luckily/providentially landing in my hometown, I understand well whereof you speak. Perhaps I am closer to an anomic state since, as a child of immigrants, I never knew my grandparents and had only a passing acquaintance with my uncles and aunts. Of my nearly 100 cousins, I am confident there is only one I would recognize if I passed him in the street. You do a fine job pointing out the costs of such dissociation.
Yet I thought there was something missing in the presentation – or maybe, perhaps more accurately, two things. The first would be a more general, and more sympathetic, accounting of the evolution of such a social order, the complexity of which I think is finely wrought by Freud:
Freud’s ruminations are a bracing tonic for the doyens of progress, but they do also appreciate the complexity of the modern world, that while it hasn’t resulted in spiritual progress (quite the contrary) it has resulted in significant material gains. (One example, as recently as 50 years ago, my wife would not have survived the birth of our first child. Whatever else is the case, this improvement in medical technologies has spared me from catastrophic losses.) Are, in fact, increases in life expectancy, decreases in infant mortality, mere “cheap pleasures”? There is much more to be said about this, but I’ll leave it there for now, as this reply will be long enough.
A second element would be a Christian understanding of vocation. To be a college professor is to choose vocation over location. At a certain age you recognized you had certain gifts; or, at least, others recognized that in you. These gifts were carefully cultivated to the point where they could find their proper expression. While it is unfortunate that their proper expression couldn’t happen in Okemos, the important thing is that they are being exercised – and, from what I understand, very well at that. Any accounting of social place must account, in some fashion, for the mechanisms and institutions by which human beings, regardless of class or sex, are able to express their gifts for the edification of others and the glory of God.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but your essay hinges on one very large and largely unexplored fact: that you chose to move away from your family, and that you persist in that decision. You can lament it and feel the pain of it, but you can’t absolve yourself of it by blaming markets and Uncle Sam. You could have stayed in your hometown, but the likely price of having done so would be to find yourself in a “career” that neither satisfied your itch nor allowed you to flourish as you might. What articles might you have written then? As soon as you attended college, you increased the odds significantly that you would never return home. Any sort of lamentation about familial disconnection has to account for these institutions of higher learning, as well as our role in them.
Great piece. I look forward to your reply.
JP
I like this essay a great deal. Well done.
My question is similar to the one posted in the first comment, but specifically deals with your final sentence: “We could, of course. Except that Mom and Dad were blasted by the great American Affliction.”
“Were blasted by” is an interesting use of the passive voice. You could just as easily have crafted it as “… except mom and dad blasted America with their …” or some such.
You went to heroic lengths to take “ownership” of your decisions throughout the piece. Still, I’d be interested in some kind of accouunting of “why,” apart from some “affliction.” It might also be interesting to see you wrestle with what a different decision might look like. Personally, I was living in the DC area and decided to move closer to home (Pittsburgh) when my wife was pregnant with twins. This entailed bailing on a six-figure job and acceepting a paltry teaching income. Two kids later, we bailed on Pittsburgh in favor of my home town. We made the decision before I had a job lined up at all. I was going to mow grass.
I can say now that it was a great decision, as things have worked out, but I am still pretty sure it was at least somewhat irresponsible to make that leap. Even for the sake of family. And if that’s what it takes, we can kiss extended families goodbye, because hardly anyone will make the choices I did. Heck, I probably wouldn’t.
I appreciate the piece, but it leaves with me with a pressing question. I know that you, along with many other FPR contributors, are in academia. That world is so inherently mobile – find me a newly minted humanities PhD and I’ll show you someone willing to move across the country for a job. I’m currently a philosophy grad student and strongly considering getting out of this game to become (gasp!) a lawyer, just so that I can choose to live near my family, to give my future kids grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. What’s the deal? How do you reconcile being committed to place with choosing academia?
I’m as much a rootless modern as anyone, and it’s true that there is really nothing stopping anyone from moving back to their hometown or within reasonable driving distance of it — except their own desires. Rootedness and extended family are the kinds of things that people talk about wistfully, but for the most part will gladly eschew for more money. In the end, even if you do move back near your family you’ll find that other family members decide to move away from you. Material always wins out with Americans.
I grew up in KY and went to school there, had my first job in Florida, second job in Kansas, and now third job in Virginia. I don’t even plan to stay here, though the next move will be the last. My parents are still in KY, but my fiancee’s parents are in Maine. (That’s another unexplored facet of this topic; what to do when you marry someone who lives across the country?) Why don’t I move back to KY? It would be nice to live near the parents, but I’m not as much a fan of KY itself. It’s nice in small doses, but in general the south is too hot for me. I want to go north…New England or Pacific Northwest (or Europe, if we do something idiotic like bomb Iran or amnesty illegals).
So there you go; I prefer a nice climate over being near the family. In the end, it doesn’t take much. I do plan to import my parents to wherever I settle so that they don’t go in a nursing home, but even the little bit of extended family that remains in KY is basically a total loss.
Thank you for this piece. It resonates strongly with my experience and choices.
I am still mourning the loss of my grandfather, who passed two weeks ago today. I just got off the phone with my uncle, his now-oldest son. It was a family call, just to check-in, see how he’s doing, if he needs anything, how Aunt R- is…
And this closeness I feel to my uncle, that I feel toward my grandfather, that I feel toward my entire family, is due to my growing up – and remaining – around them all.
With the exception of a few sojourns abroad, I have lived my entire life in a 25-mile radius of my extended family. And before my wife became my wife, we made the decision to stay here, no matter what. Our work would be shaped by this place; we would find jobs here; we would sacrifice income for in-laws.
I have great sympathy for those who deprive themselves – and their children – the blessing of communion with close relatives. But I have little sympathy for the choices they have made that resulted in said excommunication. Sometimes you have to choose between chasing your chosen career and staying with your God-given family. Chose family. Chose a career that allows you to choose family. I gave up a career in academia to be a schoolteacher because it is something I can do in the same town as my parents and in-laws. It allows my children to know their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, just as I knew mine. I had to choose to be either an academic or an abiding son, grandson, nephew, and cousin. I chose to abide.
It was especially important to me because my father – the man who was my grandfather’s oldest son – died when I was eight. Without the opportunity to spend time with my aunts and uncles who knew him so well, and with his parents, who loved him so much, I would not have had the opportunity to know him or love him as as well as I do. It impressed upon me early that family is where memories are kept; family is where you go when you die.
For those whose families are already split, dispersed, balkanized, or economized, I don’t know what to say. I know what I would do: I would pick some parents – mine or my wife’s – and stick close. Move next door. Take care of them when they age and hope my children learn the lesson. I would give my kids some grandparents.
The last time I saw my grandfather with his eyes open, was the Saturday before he died. I had been sitting with him for seven hours, and he only opened his eyes when my two year old daughter came into the room and I told him, “Grandpa, S- is here.” He opened his eyes and smiled, spoke gently and lovingly to her, laughed at her. Before I left, he asked how my wife’s family was doing. We were close. We were family.
I have an older friend who became a white collar professional in the 1950′s. He remembers that enforced mobility for advancement was a conscious policy of many employers at the time in order to develop loyalty to the corporation, rather than community. Some colleges and universities have mimicked this and do not hire their own graduates. (reminds me of the proverb about never buying whiskey from a man that wont drink his own moonshine)
Mr Peters, maybe one of your kids will grow up and choose to go home to the family home place. I made that choice and though it brought challenges (including “career” paths), it has been worth it. It only takes one. What I do wonder about are the families whose connections are broken by more than one generation from any home place,neighborhood or community ? Even if you have to drive, the connections are still there and very real. Count yourself blessed.
Jason – it is unfortunate that you take pleasure in seeing your children ride on GREEN tractors – anyone with a lick of sense knows that the only proper color for a tractor is RED – IH RED.
Other than that, what a great posting! I have never seen the phrase “orphans of success” before, but I knew exactly what you meant before I began reading. I will be using the phrase liberally in my speech and writing henceforth.
Cheap oil did not impel the Amish to take a sledge-hammer to family proximity, thus they do not need expensive oil to “tell” them to re-grow their roots. Perhaps we “English” do not REALLY need to take our marching orders from gasoline pumps either.
Actually, one of the best antidotes to this restless, far-flung American diaspora is to find where the most elders and cousins are still alive within a days drive of each other and then fly one’s own assorted pilgrims out there and rent a Large Winnebago and cram all in there and have a fine road trip, approaching the Bima of the elders and their Family Legends with an accumulating cast of characters.
Road Arking…it is what Winnebagos was created fer. That, and of course bouncing off remote and dark roadside snow piles like an eight ball in Jackson Hole after a long stint spent at the Cowboy Bar. The structural integrity of the Winnebago seems to have been expressly designed for this kind of celebratory activity . Well, thats what I’ve heard anyway.
I’m grateful for these comments, all of which deserve a better and more thorough-going original post than I provided.
I think that, rather than respond here, I’ll reprise the piece with something like “Orphans of Success, Part 2″–maybe as soon as next Wednesday. It will no doubt include some excuses, but not, Mr. Noeldner, for the color of the tractors. I am nearly agnostic on the issue, though my first extended tractor experience was with a 1938 Allis-Chalmers, a machine to which I remain partial.
Thanks for the piece – very well done. I have too many chores to do today to spend much time responding, but in my own case, the reflections of a middle-aged man. As a young man out to prove myself, I don’t know this would have found much resonance for me. And again, I don’t know that my wife would find as much resonance – her ability to find community is so much more developed than mine. Perhaps my default competitive attitude towards other men, useful perhaps when young, now is an obstacle to any sort of meaningful communion or friendship. It is perhaps only familial relationships wherein I can relax and, rather than some threat, expect support. An old, old way of thinking. But not gone.
Secondly, an attempt at a scaffolding of meaning and purpose – who are we, anyway? Maybe there is only the darkness of faith, and we are alone in that room, I think. I construct away, but life advances and I am undone. Lumber and bent nails. Speaking of which
I remember well the awkward conversation with my mentor/advisor at a generic midwest state university. She wanted me to go to Western Michigan for grad school (Medieval Studies).
I couldn’t say “Well, there’s this boy…” so I said “I don’t want to go into debt” (which was true, because–as did not tell her–debt is not conducive to starting a family).
So I got an assistantship in said university’s English Department (another mentor, when I asked her to write a recommendation, said “Why the hell do you want to go here?!”). I did not finish my MA because I married and then (surprise) conceived. (Let me tell you, the frank displeased astonishment I got from all the women in the department when they noticed my swelling belly was astounding. But
that’s another story…)
I do not regret giving up my never-started-”career,” because it meant I could marry a man who grew up 15 minutes from my own hometown. I understand this fortune doesn’t fall on everyone, but not moving to MI sure helped.
Practically, I do not know what I would do without my mother and mother-in-law and two unmarried sisters. I have 3 children under 4 years of age (presumably more to come, God willing), and I would collapse without their support. Limiting family size goes hand-in-hand with moving away from anyone who will help you unconditionally.
However, my husband lost his job in March, and we realize that we may need to move away. We are doing everything we can to remain, but our midsized city’s unemployment is at 20% and rising. Plus, how do you convince everyone else not to move away?
Peter,
My parents did much the same with my brother and I. We’d be shipped off for a couple of weeks with my father’s parents in the small Sandhills town of Valentine, then down to my mother’s sister’s ranch in Custer County, then up to her parents in tiny Ainesworth, Nebraska, then back to Valentine in August for the reunion for my paternal Grandmother’s large clan of siblings.
Though we were close as children, the older we became the more my brother and I stood as outsiders to those cousins we had swum and caught sand toads with as kids. They’re all ranchers and we’re city kids. They work outdoors in fields and pastures and we work in cubicles and libraries. Now our former closeness makes this estrangement all the harder to understand. I am still close to my aunt, but my grandparents are gone and my grown cousins are unfathomably off-putting (I suspect they have little respect for us city-slickers). I hope your children have better luck.
In the meantime, my immediate family – mom, dad, brother, and sister-in-law – is very close and I take great comfort in that. Or I did, until this week when I moved two-thousand miles away in service of my own academic goals. Like so many others, my ‘family’ here will become a family of shared interest, built out of other transient students and faculty who are similarly family-less. And of course, there is the internet.
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