Being part of the extended family

Today is the provincial public holiday for the province where I grew up, celebrating its founding day, as well as the nation’s. It’s the province where my family put down roots, when they came across the world from Ireland and the UK. A predominantly farming province, it is flanked on the west by high, snowy mountains (higher than anything in the UK or Ireland), ranges of foothills, and then green plains that run down to the Pacific Ocean. It has been terraformed to look a lot (I imagine, I haven’t been yet) like Ireland and England – green pastures, hedges, dotted with crops, sheep and cattle. But it wouldn’t have been like that when my ancestors arrived. It would have been blanketed with native bush, and now only a few reserves remain. The birdsong would have been loud and vibrant and totally foreign to the arrivals. It’s hard to imagine how they would have felt.

My great great grandfather came out to South Canterbury from Ireland, shortly after the Irish Potato Famine. He left from a little farm near Tralee, in an area called Ballymacelligott. I only recently learned this. I’m hoping to learn a lot more. Loribeth’s webinar with Michael Hughes for World Childless Week has inspired me. We don’t need to have kids to think about our families, their history, OR their future. We don’t need to have kids to be interested in everyone’s past and future. We just need to be human, and curious. I think that's easier for us to understand than those who focus so heavily on their children and their immediate families.

So often I find that childless women (especially women) are the ones who keep their families together, in touch with each other, or who research the family history for the benefit of the future generations. There are a lot of reasons why we do it. But I wonder how often it is appreciated by other family members, or whether they understand the tiny degree of pain we might feel when we know we’re contributing to a family that might soon forget us. What does being part of a family really mean to them?