A Family Weathering the Storms

I was recently reminded by a friend that “healing” can come from exploring your family’s story. As a genealogist, she is trained to document the stories of people’s lives, tracking their twists and turns back through time as they navigate life. Unlike psychologists, trained to look first for pathology, she pursues stories of linkage and connection across a family’s movement through time. These explorations can reveal a family’s best moments and their worst, but there is still something powerful about knowing where you come from, who you come from, and what they have come through. Growing up, my parents talked about the Great Depression (1929–1939) and what their families did to find work and survive as African Americans living in the South. They weren’t always forthcoming about this period in their lives, but with some probing, they would share stories that helped me make meaning of what they had come through and who they had become.

My father had a few hoarding habits that I thought were quite strange until I better understood the impact the Depression had on him. His family was poor, and he learned to save almost everything that held any possibility of reuse. It should be no surprise, then, that his stories of lack often followed our childhood attempts to persuade him that we needed some new thing that other kids around us were getting.

My mother’s stories of her family were also of struggle and persistence. After losing his wife in childbirth (1925), my maternal grandfather joined with his mother, a widow, to form a multigenerational household to care for his three children. As the Depression took hold, he left Tennessee, traveling north to pursue work. Shortly after leaving, tragedy struck again when his mother died and left him to raise three children alone. The oldest was my mother, who was only seven years old at the time. Forced to grow up quickly, she became the maternal figure for her two younger siblings. As an adult with her own three children, there were times this child of seven years re-emerged, orphaned and anxious. There were other times she arrived playful and silly. We, as her children, adapted to her quirks and her giftedness, but these unique aspects of her are now the stories my siblings and I tell.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my parents were rehearsing the stories and myths of survival, resilience, thriving, and faith. I’m sure my parents’ first purpose was to temper our expectations, but they also shaped our ability to engage the unfairness of Black life and still hold in our bodies a knowing that G-d loved us.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been one of the most challenging and disruptive events on family relations and individual well-being in many decades. Unfortunately, this pandemic hit us when health issues—particularly those often called “deaths of despair”—were already on the rise. The polarized political environment, economic uncertainty, and racial tensions worsened. And this storm further exposed our institutional weaknesses, eroded familial resources, destabilized the work world, and overwhelmed our bodies with stress-induced hormones.

Froma Walsh believed that family “resilience was forged through adversity, not despite it.”¹ However, there is a point when coping strategies are overwhelmed, and families can no longer effectively adapt, fragmenting in the face of failing institutions.

Pandemics have complicated recovery periods. Like a tornado striking a town, they leave destruction and turmoil in their wake. Clearing the storm damage and rebuilding takes time. This pandemic is no different, as we’re likely to linger in this later stage of COVID for a while, weathering more strains and slowly coming to realize the long-term damage. Major medical, cultural, and social events can rip through family systems, shaping and reshaping them in powerful ways, straining bonds and leaving families more fragile. However, this can also be a moment in a family’s story to rebound and overcome the crisis.

I feel quite fortunate that during the pandemic my connections with my sister and brother have grown. We’ve recommitted to regular Zoom and phone calls, and we’ve recommitted to sharing our stories. This has been such a gift to me—knowing they are there and learning what has shaped life for them. It’s not unusual for us to spend the first minutes catching up on the current challenges and then the next twenty laughing about memories of growing up in the same household reinterpreted from three different points of view. We always end our time in prayer, a legacy from the people who came before us. As my brother says, “We don’t pray like they prayed. They made things happen when they prayed.” The laughter and joy of remembering are surprisingly soothing, and the prayer at the end is reaffirming and grounding, but the stories hold us together and allow us to weather the storm.

As their adult children, we eventually fall into three generational stories about “the parents”—stories of their shaping and limitations that often reveal our own wounds and blessings. Our parents’ stories hold generations of cultural learning, some from failure, but most from their stubborn persistence to make life meaningful for their children. In turn, we tell our stories, repeat their stories, and weave in our children’s stories, creating another generation of stories, a recursive dance of family resilience.

Now, as I reflect on these stories, I see them as woven threads adding to the oral history of a Black family that always had to weather difficult circumstances in challenging times. Ours was not a collective story of increased status, nobility, or conquest, but a persistent testimony of the hope we have in a G-d who can make all things new. In a season of cultural disruption and change, we do need to look back to look forward. We must learn again how to draw on family legacies to help us navigate the current cultural realities.