Fire and Ice

I am afraid my little blog has been horribly neglected these last weeks since a family reunion has been the recipient of most of the energy and motivation I would  normally set aside for this hobby.  This leaves me in a classic Catch 22:  Exactly at the time I need most to be writing to sort through the frenzy of family dynamics, I have the least time to do it.  But here (below) are some hasty thoughts sketched together during a break from the action while the uncles (pictured below with Grandma and Grandpa) craft homemade Italian sausage and my daughter naps.

Family lore tells us that my grandparents met when Grandpa was serving in the military in Italy and the troops threw a Christmas party for the orphans of the city.  Since none of the soldiers spoke Italian, they asked a few pretty Italian girls to translate.  My Grandmother was among them and apparently Grandpa asked her back to his place to “look at his Christmas tree.”  (I’m afraid to ask if this is a euphemism.  Knowing my lively and sensual Italian Grandma, she would give me an honest answer whether I liked it or not).

The first half of the story is usually recounted with smiles and winks in convivial moments as a family.  It was a romance worthy of the storybooks.  But the next half of the story is delivered with less pride.  It is told in hushed tones over late-night tables with a bottle of wine and a sense that regrets confessed and pain shared have a better chance at redemption.  The windswept plains of South Dakota and the sultry warmth of the Italian coast would not meet without some earth shaking.  When my grandpa brought grandma home to South Dakota, his stoic Midwestern family coldly rejected her.  I could explain their behavior by setting it in it’s historic context:  Post WWII, Italian-Americans faced considerable bigotry due to Italy’s wartime alliances.  Additionally, grandpa’s family was Protestant and Grandma was Catholic, irreconcilable differences in that era. Historical explanation aside, in reality their behavior just seems cruel and mean-spirited to me.  Still, despite the wars,  (both WWII and the family cultural war) they both made it through the early years and raised three lively sons who married and raised 11 grandchildren.

This brief backstory is important because the coupling of my grandparents and their family histories and culture, one side emotionally reserved and cool-on-the-surface  and the other side expressive and hot-to-the-core, has been repeated in various combinations and degrees by all of their offspring:  my father, uncles, siblings, cousins and myself.  Cold and hot.  Passive and aggressive.  Desiring to have control and desiring to throw caution to the wind.  Toss these ingredients like dice into a shaker and see how many amalgamations you come up with: these are the minerals and nutrients that feed the soil that roots our family tree.

This week, as we reveal our lives over espresso and wine to these relatives that we barely know yet with whom we feel an undeniable kinship,  our family relational similarities become glaringly evident.  Perhaps our “mating patterns” were passed down like other family customs and traditions but somehow it seems like a more deeply intrinsic characteristic.   For all of us, the descendants of this fire and ice marriage, the pull into these types of pairings has been so strong and so universal that I cannot help but wonder if there’s something even more innate and instinctual–almost unescapable— underpinning our relationship choices.  It truly does seem to be in our blood.

There’s so much that swirls and grows out of this fundamental family truth, leaving  a complex and continuing legacy that vines and twines throughout our lives.  Cousins, uncles, aunts, siblings…. we each live out this dynamic that is both raw and composed, ungainly and beautiful, dangerous and comforting all at once.  Is it something to celebrate, laugh at and embrace?  Or is it something we need to analyze and understand and make mellow by taming it?  Whatever our approach, before we have a chance to really even identify it, I can already predict it’s mark will be evident on the next generation.  For good or for bad, it’s clear that family dynamics don’t easily die.

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