breadcrumbs in ohio

I spent Sunday driving the seven hours from Akron, Ohio to Annapolis, Maryland with my kids chirping away in the backseat and no one but a sad, stale, nearly empty bag of Trader Joe's style Pirate Booty on the passenger seat beside me. I suffered from a nasty summer cold. I had driven seven hours in the opposite direction just two days before. And I played hundreds of rounds of animal-only 20 questions. The children's selections included a dark-eyed junco, a Vietnamese snow leopard, a ground beetle and a port jackson shark, and because we read the same non-fiction nature books, it somehow worked.

However. Even the most successful and determined 20 questions players will disintegrate into absurdity eventually, and I knew when Gabriel started asking things like "Is it a heebee geebee? Is it a poopy skidoopy?" that we were in trouble. And still so many miles from home!

But really, trouble is a relative term. We made it. And even though Mike was called away by a family emergency at the last minute and couldn't join us on this trip, and even though I got sick, everything was just fine. We rolled off 97 and into Annapolis in the late day heat with all the windows down, giddy, blasting the Beastie Boys. I watched Frances and Gabriel in the rear view mirror doing their ridiculous little kid hip hop moves, hair flying in the wind, and I felt very capable.  

Besides having bigger kids who are also capable - sometimes moreso than I give them credit for - I know that the drive back worked because of my confidence that those hours of driving were more than worth it. We had been to Ohio to help celebrate my grandfather's 90th birthday, along with my mother, aunts, sister, niece (we're a female-heavy family) and many other people I had never met before, or met once or twice as a child.

My mother's family isn't the closest, and I hadn't seen Poppy since my sister's wedding almost five years ago. But during that visit, Frances and Poppy bonded immediately, and seeing the two of them together reacquainted me with the closeness I felt with him as a child. The children have corresponded with him since, which is very sweet. Somehow sitting next to him over the weekend, an extraordinarily vital nonagenarian - the same man who read me stories in his lap, who built my sister and me a pink-and-white playhouse in our backyard, who we knew never to talk politics with, even as children - brought me a sense of great peace and comfort. He's the same guy. I'm more or less the same person too. A thread of connection, unbroken by space and time.

The book I'm now reading is organized into letters written by an older therapist to her much younger graduate student. One letter is about following what she calls "breadcrumbs" - the pictures, stories, and memories from our childhood that we can trace to figure out who we are and where we come from. We all make up narratives to explain ourselves and our pasts, and we can get pretty nicely settled into certain story lines. But oh, it is arresting and wondrous to be surprised by a stray breadcrumb! Me, Poppy's granddaughter? Me, a Korach? A part of a family whose story stretches to Eastern Europe, some of whose members perished in the camps, some of whose members struck out at tender ages for America, where they accomplished amazing things? Can my life - and my mothering - possibly be part of that legacy?
  
As a child I spent a lot of time wondering about the Korachs of the past and imagining what they were like. I spent time wondering and imagining what the Korachs of the present were like, sitting back, watching my mother slip into her family ways with them over the Thanksgiving table. But only over the weekend did I realize that I am them, part of the story. My kids are too. We're different--who isn't?--but we're not separate.

Gabriel took the pictures here. Maybe they can be breadcrumbs for him someday.

A therapist needs to reflect on who she is. I understand that. But the task seems equally urgent for a parent: how else can we give ourselves and our stories to our kids?