Family

My great-grandmother with her family in Mandal, Norway circa 1894. She's the baby. All of the children eventually immigrated to America.

As a lifelong lover of history, family has always been important to me. Learning where my family came from and what their lives were like has always fascinated me. A distant cousin once published a history of our family - in Norwegian - and I pored over the charts, names and dates until the cover fell off. My family is my North Star. No matter what my life in the real world is like at any given moment, the stability and predictability of holidays and gatherings with my extended family grounds me.

 One of the reasons I am such a believer in marriage over co-habitation is because of the recognition of the new husband or wife's joining into the extended family unit. Jack was my partner for years before we exchanged wedding vows. On that day, he became not only my lover but my family. Many lives seem to revolve around a central theme - the engineer whose biography is rife with an appreciation for science at an early age, the cellist who sought out music wherever her travels took her.

 The central theme of my life is my family - the intense bond my cousin TechnoBunny and I shared throughout my childhood, the sense of humor and categorization of the world Shakira and I developed throughout many many hours together in our 20s, the way motherhood has drawn me closer to my own mother than ever before.

 Shakira refers to me as the family historian because I can rattle off the names of cousins, their relation to us, where they live and who they're married to without so much as a pause. It's always fascinated me to trace the path of a single ancestor's descendants and to see how far the branches have spread. I hope this blog entry doesn't read like one long advertisement for ancestry.com (though I do love that site.) I just figured it was time that I put what is perhaps my life's greatest passion into words.

Me with some of my first, second, and third cousins and their spouses and offspring this summer at Lake Sebago in Maine. The cousins are all descendants of Bertha, Tonetta, Olava and Tobine - the four sisters pictured up top. I'm in the beach hat and TechnoBunny is next to me in the sunglasses and blue shirt.

Don't you just hate abandoned blogs?

I did not manage to capture any of my New England or European summer adventures over the past few months. Apologies.

I have a tendency to over indulge in nostalgia, a habit I have consciously been avoiding over the past few years. I also like to project far into the future, a habit which has not gotten any better. September will always be a time of freshly sharpened pencils, crisp new sheets of notebook paper. A good time to move forward. Petal is enrolled in new classes - they refer to the "semester" in her music class, too cute. The "curriculum" is tools, high & low, and fast & slow.

I work for an education non-profit specifically focused on teacher quality. At this stage of my life, I openly and guiltlessly rank work well below child rearing in terms of priority, energy and time.

But thinking so much about the education system and specifically teaching gets the wheels in my mind turning. Once Petal has developed an independent life, I want something to devote my energy to that is meaningful, interesting and challenging.

Is teaching that thing? Helping to prepare the next generation is certainly meaningful work. I'm familiar enough with the education system to know that, especially for newbies, it's definitely challenging. And my love of history ensures that the material I would present would always be interesting to me. Even the pre-reqs in social studies that I would need prior to enrolling in an M.Ed. in Social Studies 7-12 program fill me with giddy glee. I would love to study geography again!

I am notorious for changing my mind (I spent all summer telling anyone who would listen about how I've decided I want to work in education policy when Petal is older) so this new life plan could just be a blip on the radar. But right now I'm excited about it and, since we all know how important it is to live in the moment, right now I will just enjoy the excitement filling my present moment, regardless of what I actually choose to do with my future.