What my dear old great-aunts viewed as scandals, I realized were the day to day struggles and challenges found in any normal family.

Don’t Tell ME my Family Isn’t Normal!

Oh, sure. We have our quirks. We have our embarrassing moments as a family and as individuals. We think we would like to be able to hide them from the community, congregation and extended family; hopeless as it sounds. Unfortunately for my posterity, time will probably grant my family that sanitization. Except in cases of family infamy, it usually does. I imagine that annuls of history will treat us as a pretty normal family, though in my own lifetime most might look at our challenges and question that status.

I’m not confessing to anything extreme and our family is not a violent one. We’re a normal family.

As parents, my wife and I have sat in court to hear the sentencing of one of our daughters to time in a penal institution. Several of our family members (that I know of) myself included, have been rightfully chastised by religious leaders for failing to adequately live up to scriptural and religious teachings. Really, that’s no skin off my nose. I have always been better at learning from preaching than delivering it. We have had to stop physical fights between some of our children before attending to black eyes and bloody noses. I’m not confessing to anything extreme and our family is not a violent one. We’re a normal family. We are also like most families in that we have always tried to hide these embarrassing improprieties as much as we possibly can. Everyone would rather talk than be talked about.

I realized my great grandfather’s family was a normal family, too.

Several years ago my family had the opportunity to purchase a small wooden Victorian home constructed in the 1890’s. The home (quite large for its day) had been purchased by my great grandfather in the late 1920s and it’s the home that the youngest of his ten children remember from their childhoods. Only one of them remains alive today and she is in her mid-nineties. There are long-living genes in that family. In fact, I still remember my great grandfather who owned that house, who passed away when I was thirteen. He was ninety-nine at the time so in all of my memories, his posture resembled a jumbo shrimp. But he was my grandpa. And he was my grandma’s “dear old daddy.” In fact, many of the stories I grew up with, that encouraged me to “be good,” originated with tales of that family which I imagined to approach perfection. It wasn’t until after we bought the old home when I realized my great grandfather’s family was a normal family, too.

The stories that meant the most to me were the ones that talked about a normal family.

As I went looking for old photographs to scan and add to the walls of the ancestral home, I received an education that few in my generation were privy to. My dear old great-aunts helped me to identify the ancient pictures (some dating from the nineteenth century) from their own scrap books and the ones from my own grandmother, who was long-gone by then. The old women dug deep in their memories and shared stories that I had never heard. The stories that meant the most to me were not the ones that you might suspect. Of course I was proud to hear of family members who had risked their own lives during a flu epidemic when they went to help in homes that had no one well enough to clean or prepare meals. It stroked my ego to hear of family and individual accomplishments that made me feel like my family members had been stalwarts in a small mountain valley. I enjoyed seeing pictures of award ceremonies and I saw actual trophies from national competitions that still gleamed after more than a half-century. The stories that meant the most to me were the ones that talked about a normal family.

What my dear old great-aunts viewed as scandals, I realized were the day to day struggles and challenges found in any normal family.

Of course I was sworn to secrecy before I heard tales of one uncle punching another through the window of his car. No one could ever know that one of the sisters had “gotten in a family way” with someone who couldn’t be in a family with her. The baby miscarried though, limiting the damage until time could cover over the impropriety. There were so many stories; stories that the old ladies told in hushed tones, looking over their shoulders, even now, as if to ensure that no one else would hear of the scandals that no one else knew. What my dear old great-aunts viewed as scandals, I realized were the day to day struggles and challenges found in any normal family.

I had found the perfectly normal family that I finally felt I fit into.

Within a few generations time placed some of my ancestors and their families on quite a pedestal, with reputations that I knew I could never approach. But I held them up, in my naiveté, as a lofty goal that I should aim for so that I might do well, even if falling short. And as I did fall short, I always lamented, knowing that I must be a disappointment to those who had done so much better than I. I knew that I was supposed to do better because I had descended from great examples, not from a normal family. The un-sanitized family history that I learned brought me new respect for my ancestors. They leaned on their family. They supported each other. That family helped each other through embarrassing times, financial catastrophes and worse. I had found the perfectly normal family that I finally felt I fit into.

I want my descendants to know that I don’t judge them because their improprieties are different than mine. I want them to know that they are normal and that they come from a normal family.

Perhaps time will polish up the scratches in the paint of the family that my wife and I are raising just as it did for my great-grandfather. I sure hope not. I want my descendants to know that there were times when we couldn’t pay our bills and that we broke financial promises, because I also want them to know how hard we worked to right those wrongs that we committed. When one of my grandchildren or great-grandchildren thinks that he can’t live with the humiliation of his family finding out about something wrong he has done, I want him to know that he can live with it. I want him to know that mistakes and making ourselves better is a part of life, not a reason to consider death. I want him to know that I had my own problems and was a source of embarrassment to my own family on more than one occasion. I want my descendants to whom goodness comes naturally, to know that they didn’t get it from me. I also want them to understand that they probably wouldn’t be standing around talking about me if it wasn’t for kind and forgiving family members that were always proud to include me in the family, whether or not my actions deserved their recognition. I want my descendants to know that I don’t judge them because their improprieties are different than mine. I want them to know that they are normal and that they come from a normal family.

A normal family isn’t one without bumps and bruises. A normal family isn’t one of perfection no matter what the family historian recorded or the story-teller passed down. Normal families have bad days. We have challenges, struggles, sins, embarrassments, illness, disorders, differences, and syndromes. We have good days too. Those are the ones we like to remember, so we talk about those good days the most. In fact, we might even embellish, just a bit. So I hope that as my posterity looks at our family picture they smile and tell some fun and inspiring stories. Then I hope at least one of them has the guts to point at me and say; “He did some good things. But he wasn’t the saint that some make him out to be.”

And then I hope they are all proud to know that each one is a very important part of a very normal family.

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