My mom came from northern appalachia, from a family of farmers and Irish bootleggers. She has an absolutely absurd number of siblings, which was normal for that time period, for farming families anyway. Her father worked in steel, hunted for the family's food, and tended an impossibly large vegetable garden with my grandmother.
My mother's ancestry is of the earth. It is tales of soil between our fingers, the fruit of endless toils, and mornings spent working in the field. I can smell my mother's inheritance, like a root cellar filled with glass jars of the year's harvest.
My mother's family is overwhelmingly female. And female-driven.
Her mother, my grandmother, was full-blooded German and descended of farmers herself. She ran a house gracefully, was a devout Catholic, and led the family with a surprising amount of strength. She had a good many daughters but only few sons. And they struggled in their own ways, while her daughters perservered.
My mom's theory was this: the girls in her family learned all the tasks and skills, while the boys were only taught what was considered appropriate and respectable for boys to know. So while my Aunt Tilda learned to cook and clean, she also hunted alongside her dad into her teenage years. Uncle Bert hunted as well, but he never had to get his mind around pressing a shirt or cooking pork chops.
Photo by Thomas Verbruggen on Unsplash
A patriarchy fails men, too
When my Aunt Barb died, her widower, my Uncle Jack, floundered. All his life it had been assumed he would have a woman to run his household, make his meals, and clean his clothes. But Aunt Barb died in her sixties, with Uncle Jack just barely 70. Uncle Jack just isn't the same without Aunt Barb. It's painfully obvious how much she kept things together for the two of them.
Aunt Tilda, on the other hand, divorced her whack-job husband in the early seventies and had lived in her own victorian farmhouse ever since. She could make any minor or major repair necessary to keep her house together, and was most often remembered for the time she replaced her own roof when she was 74. Her home was a gorgeous mix of antiques and pieces she had collected on her travels.
It seemed that nobody in my mother's family was all that concerned with what the girls did, just so long as they raised the boys proper. I wonder if they ever realized they were raising women that could build houses with their own bare hands, breed horses, race cars, and build admirable careers.
I'm rather grateful for that.
