"...a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations. In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most."I've been thinking about the choices made in the past five generations on both sides of my family and the impact those choices have had on me, my siblings, and my cousins. So often in life we hear someone say, "Well, I'm only hurting myself so it doesn't matter." But that's not true. You make a choice and have the freedom to make that choice but the affects of that choice resonate outward from you like ripples in a pond; you have no control over where they go or what they touch.
It's amazing to me how one person's actions can affect the personality and life choices of their descendants. I think of Leah who gave birth to my mother's mother and her siblings but abandoned her family when the youngest was about a year old. I think of Dorothy who married into that family and raised Leah's children in a community that knew everything about everyone. I wonder about Josephine who left what was the Austro-Bohemian-Hungarian Empire to come to the United States and wasn't allowed to put her true nationality on the census records until 1930; she was born in Bohemia near Prague but had to say Vienna, Austria. There's Rosa Brown who is listed as a Mulatto on the census records. And Hilma who left Sweden to find her hand fasted husband and met the man who would be my grandfather's father.
Their choices have an impact on my life. They've influenced the way my grandparents and parents expressed love. They taught their descendants how to communicate or not communicate. They've affected the way my siblings and I and our cousins interact as adults. Their stories are ours and we are the people we are today because we came from them. Never underestimate your ability to affect the generations that come after you; they live with the consequences of your choices, the attitudes you have about things, and learn how to be people from watching how you treat others.
It is very true that we are (in some degree) who they were as well as who we are. And by "they" I clearly mean our ancestors.
ReplyDeleteBut it's also true that we can become someone different. We have the ability to make our own choices and to react in ways they didn't teach us, and to communicate (or not) in our own way.
Their choices can put us in circumstances or places that they could not have even guessed at, and we are here to take the blessings and trials of those choices and build our lives around them. And then also pass along the tradition of making our own choices that affect more people than just us.