Catholic Herald Parenting™

	Friends of the Family

On top of the upright piano in our living room is a beautiful black and white portrait of my great-grandfather, great-grandmother and their three children. My grandfather is a young man in his early 20s sporting a handlebar mustache. He is flanked by his two sisters. Everyone looks very sober, not hostile, as they held still in their starched, formal attire waiting for the photographer.

We have other photographs of my grandfather. A very faded one shows him "hanging out" 19th-century style with the other members of the local baseball team. Another shows him and my grandmother in their 50s, overdressed by today's standards and stylish by any standards, standing beside each other on the pier in front of their lake cottage.

It struck me that although I know a few details of my grandfather's life, I knew next-to-nothing about the two young women in the family portrait, his sisters and my great aunts. I called my uncle to find out what he knew.

He told me that Aunt Louise lived in Manitowoc and Aunt Emma lived in Cleveland. He saw Aunt Louise more often, but had only vague memories of Aunt Emma since the two families rarely made the trek between Wisconsin and Ohio. He suggested I call his first cousin, Greg, Louise's grandson.

Both my parents came from large families. When I was growing up, I absorbed bits and pieces of conversations about an overwhelming parade of relatives of all ages and professions. These fragments of names, dates, and stories are like pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle that have been tossed about and then stored haphazardly in a cardboard box. Some pieces have been lost, many are still there, but how do they all fit together?

Greg sent me the family tree for his side of the family, along with a long clipping about Louise's first husband. Suddenly a revelation! Thirty years ago I had asked an old, kindly man a series of questions about the family history and taped his answers. But it was only now that I realized who he was, my great Aunt Louise's son from her first marriage. Now I knew how we were related. For the first time I understood how many of the names from childhood fit on the family tree. I felt the connection to an elderly man I barely knew and who helped me so long ago.

There is a connection.

What happens when we forget that there's a connection? Social life changes from a collaboration to a competition. If there is only so much to go around, then I need to grab it before you do.

Competition means there are winners and losers. And if you're a loser, that's not my problem. Not only is your losing not my problem, it's part of my gain. Less for you only means there's more left in the pot for me. Of course, I need to make sure that I get as far away from you as possible with my winnings, because you may resent that I live in luxury while you're stuck in poverty. You may try to get some of what is "rightfully mine."

Competition means get out of my way. Is that why so many drivers insist on cutting ahead and the drivers that are cut off insist on giving chase? When you enter the grocery store, do you barge in as fast as you can, or turn around to hold the door open for the person behind you?

Violence comes from forgetting that we are all connected. What I do to you, diminishes me. What I do for you, enhances me.

I asked my younger son to come to our office at home to watch me enter some more names and dates into the Family Tree Maker program of the computer. In the mid 1980s an older distant cousin, whom I met once or twice in my life, compiled a family tree on my grandmother's side of the family. He traced one branch back to the mid-1700s and brought it down to the present day. I was someone he barely knew. And now my son, who wasn't even born when my cousin completed the research, was benefiting from all of his labor. There's a connection.

Then I entered my younger son's name into the program, so that there was a picture of the tree with all its branches filtering down to him as the present focal point. 1760 to 2002. The branches stretched out and expanded for almost three centuries. This was the history of one side of my family.

If we could keep extending those branches indefinitely into a computer with almost infinite storage, we would see that it is not really about my family or your family. We would see all the branches coming together. We are all connected. Every kind thought, generous deed, and sacrifice made by all of the people long gone from this earth live on in who my son is today. And who your daughter is today. It is we who will determine what is left for all of our great-grandchildren tomorrow.

(Pankratz is a marriage and family therapist at Catholic Charities Milwaukee regional office.)