On my father's side of my family, there is a large and extended family, dating back to the arrival of the first patriarch in 1886 on Canadian soil.  This man, having had two wives (though not both at the same time), went forth and multiplied, as did his children and his grand-children. Even some of his great-grand-children are still heeding the call of the recent immigrant, and reproducing lovely children.

This weekend marked the third family reunion, the first having been held on the centennial of the family's arrival, and the second seven years ago.   I've been to all three, but this is decidedly the one I've enjoyed the most.   It was also the first reunion I've attended without my parents.  They were both alive for the last one, and are both dead now.  In some odd way, not having the immediate older generation present -- at least in the form of parents -- was disturbingly liberating.  It's as though I were finally free to be an adult, or perhaps to be a child, without responsibility for the well-being of others. 

At past family events, on either side of the family, I was at my mother's side, painfully conscious of her own despairing certainty that others there, particularly the women of her generation, were more beautiful, more accomplished, and generally better people.  Not that this was true, I now realize.  But it was certainly her view of the world.  And because she was hurt by her less-than- adequate status when she pondered such comparisons, I felt they were somehow responsible for how she felt.

This time, I found I quite liked them.  It occurs to me, of course, that perhaps they're just coming into their own, in some ways.  Their children are grown and gone; they seem to have sorted through the "empty nest" stuff and have either found their own passions, or have had the freedom to pursue them more passionatly.  I found these women to be warm, talented, and welcoming.   Would my mother have found the same thing? Would I have found the same thing, had my mother been living and present?

In some odd way, it's as though my mother's death freed me to find other women in my father's family at least who are role models of how to age with grace and joy.  My mother did not age with grace and joy.  Nor did she live with grace and joy.  She lived (and died, when I think about it) with angst, a profound sense of inferiority compared to almost anyone, no sense of accomplishment outside the classroom and in what she perceived to be reflected glory from her children.  She anticipated death with more equinimity and peace than she ever felt when facing life.  

I heard frequently this weekend how very much I look like my mother did at my age.  I sound like her.  I have many of her mannersisms.   And all are true assessments, I believe.  But for reasons that have more to do with her unconditional (if incompetent) love for me as a mother than with anything I've done to deserve it, I have been able to build a joyous life. I am able, at last, to be in a room of accomplished, attractive people, and not be certain that I am inferior to them.   Hell, I don't even think to make the comparison. 

In addition to an unconditionally loving mother, I had other advantages that my mother didn't enjoy.  One was being raised with the strong message that I could do and be anything I wanted to be.  It wasn't an unmixed message over the years, but it was a consistent one.  Another was having opportunities to explore and expand  my abilities and come up against my limitations.  A third was that I am not a mother; I will never know the experience of raising children and creating the most important legacy a human female can create; nor will I know the limits and constraints that this opportunity imposes for a decade or two or more of any mother's life.  Finally, I had enough courage and confidence to get professional help, so that I could leave behind the hereditary depression, malaise and confusion that has infected generation after generation of women in my mother's family. 

And probably in my father's family, too, with some notable exceptions.  But those were exceptions, as I note that many of the women I bonded with over this weekend were women who married men of my father's clan, not women born to it.  Most of these family-by-marriage members came from families who were not recent immigrants, where women were not on the one hand encouraged to become educated, and on the other hand, always second to their elder brothers in the estimation of parents and grand-parents. 

Perhaps my greatest debt is in fact to my mother, and those children of immigrants and other women of her generation who fought for their own identity, and found it, only to have it submerged by the war-wounds (emotional and physical) their brothers returned home with, the entitlements offered veterans and other young men, and the myriad of supporting roles they were sentenced to play for at least twenty or thirty years of their lives.  They have raised daughters who have different choices and different lives.  And some of them who survive are now thriving.   And to them all, I say thank you.

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