Q1 5 Hour Work!

Pictured is a partial family tree I created after talking to some of my family. It isn't finished because it's difficult to format it correctly so that each generation stays on its own line and to include everyone I'd like to without going off the page, but right now it gives a small picture, anyway.

For my 5-hour project, I interviewed members of my family about their lives before I knew them. What's interesting is that different people (sometimes based on age, but sometimes I think based on personality) tell stories in different tones and lights. When I speak to my grandfather, he tells everything the way he might recount a story from something he's read; there's a specific chronology to everything, like everything he remembers is carefully stowed away, and he seems very sure of what he remembers enough to tell me and what he doesn't. He played in the army bands in World War II (clarinet and saxophone) to avoid fighting. He'll tell me about how he got involved and all the great musicians he met (disappointed that I've never heard of most of them), and when he gets into the war details, which he knows like an encyclopedia, my grandmother is the sort of person who starts editing out loud.

My mother, who I also talked to, always tells me that she had a life before me, you know, in that frustrated and defensive way that parents sometimes do--but she's still relatively reluctant to talk about that life. Everything she tells me, she tells me as though I should already know it--like her life is a history book, or something. She assumes lots of things--"well, of course we were wearing bellbottoms, it was the seventies"--and it's entertaining, but she also has a lot of things she hesitates to talk about. She skims over relationships very quickly. When I came out to her, she told me she wished I'd told her earlier because I'd been harboring some sort of secret but also because she had experiences that she wanted to discuss with me , now that I was seventeen etc. etc. etc. and had told her this and had a girlfriend etc., but when it comes down to it, she's very awkward about actually revealing information about her life. I think maybe she's suppressed some important pieces, or at least decided not to reveal them easily, and she's caught off guard by my questions.

The truth is that me and my mother are a lot alike. There are some things, especially certain relationships, that are very important within my memory but also very private, and I think in some ways I both never ever want to discuss them and desperately need to. There are a few experiences that I get very awkward and quiet about, the same way my mother does, not because I don't trust people but because I don't know how to translate my experience and how intense and important the memory of it or the truth of it is, and it scares me that I might misrepresent something so significant.