Monday, August 21, 2006
Less Quiet, More Bookish
I spent the afternoon with the filmmakers yesterday. They accompanied me and my family to church and took some footage there. Then they wanted to see the housing project where I grew up. We definately got some much better footage there. The best footage of the day came when I spontaneously got the idea to visit one of my aunts who still lives in the "old neighborhood." We drove the few blocks to her apartment complex and to my surprise and delight, several of my cousins were there having Sunday dinner. They graciously allowed the Brits to film them telling about what a weird kid I was (quiet and bookish). It was really a fun visit- I can always count on my loud, rowdy family to just be themselves. As the camera rolled, my aunt told about her three homebirths that I never knew about (I knew that my grandmother had had her 24 children at home). So it seems I have a family legacy of both midwifery (my grandmother) and homebirth. Perhaps I'm not such a freak after all. Perhaps I am only tapping into my true heritage. How could we lose so much ground in only a couple of generations? I'm sure most of my cousins have never heard these stories either. Makes me want to write them down somewhere. (Oh my god, not another book!)
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2 comments:
sounds like me as a child - quiet and bookish - so bookish that i once read through a small housefire completely oblivious to all the rushing about with water and so on..lol! i'm less quiet too but alas, less bookish.
I marvel at your grandmother having 24 kids..24!..let alone them all being born at home - i think that is certainly another book, your family history and it really is so sad, the loss of ground in a generation or so, how on earth did that happen? it's almost , oh i can't think of the word, not just a disservice to women but a disservice to the babies themselves..how wonderful would it be to be born into a loving environment at home instead of the harsh reality of a hospital? that has to be a better start for baby surely? in england they always had their 1st in hospital and if that went well they had the others at home..i don't know if they still do that..my mother-in-law told me.
What a funny story about the fire! My mother swears that I wear glasses today because I would read and not stop to even turn on the light as the sun went down. I would keep reading until I literally couldn't see the pages any longer. She would open the door to my room and find me reading in the dark!
Hearing these family stories makes me want to investigate and find out more. My family is so large, I think it would make a good case study in one of those scholarly journals on generational changes in the culture of birth.
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