I’m getting ready for my one and only grandchild’s vist this week to celebrate his first birthday, and I can’t imagine loving any grandchild any more than I love him.
At the same time, I’m having this odd thought: the female lineage of my family ends with my daughter. Her one and only child is a boy. The generations of my family’s genes that have been passed down from mother to daughter for centuries ends with her. She is past forty and will be having no more children. No daughters.
Our last photo of four generations of women was taken when my daughter was about six months old and I was in my twenties and my mother was in her forties and my grandmother was in her sixties. No more passing down of family genes and secrets and stories and myths from daughter to daughter to daughter….. Something I’ve always taken for granted is gone.
Well, I might not someday be watching Alexander bounce around in a tu-tu, but I sure will pass along to him our family secrets and stories and myths, and I’m sure even a few of my wayward genes. Maybe he’ll even let me teach him to ballroom dance.
In the real world, the end of this female line doesn’t really make much difference. But in my mythic one, it feels somehow important, and I’m sure that there is a poem to be written about this after I let the feeling simmer for a while.
Kalilily Time
Just an old lady talking to herself
But the genes go on — male or female — diluting, yes, over the years, but the sense of us goes on: it’s why we have the stories, and myths, and “secrets” and why it’s important to pass them on — male or female — so we always have a sense of where we came from, and whom. So giving them to your grandson is important. Someday, he may father a daughter…and there your genes still will be, along with where she arose from.
Yes, this is a sobering thought: that we will have no other women to pass ourselves, our stories and quirks on to. But, myrln is right. Damn him. (It must just be a “girl” thing.) Now I know the pain some bachelor hermits must feel when they realize they are end of their line.