Friday, April 12, 2013

Healing the Past Progress

I thought you'd like to see how the stitching was going. I'm filling in the colored squares. I love the blue, but it is too sad. I started working in other colors- green for my grandmother's garden, yellow for the cornbread she made every day. This is producing a patchwork effect and as my Granny was an avid quilter, I'm sure she'd approve. As I work on this project, and remember more, I see my grandmother more and more as a real person. We tend to think of family members just in terms of their relation to us and forget they had a life before they became mother or grandmother.

This is my great-grandmother, the mother of the lady in the first picture. I was going to work on her next. Then one of my cousins left a comment on Kurt's facebook page. She said I look just like Maw Maw and she wished she had a picture of her. Suzie is 10 years old than me and she actually remembers our great-grandmother. I decided to send this picture to her. I'm a little nervous about it, because showing attention to one family member tends to make the others whine in jealousy. But this is about me and how I feel. I have several pictures, Suzie has none. It will make her happy. And if others get mad, well, that's just stupid because if they had asked nicely I'd send them pictures too.

I'm starting to see how people in my family react in jealousy and spite. Now I'm starting to ask myself these questions: Did I really do anything wrong? Can I correct my mistake if I did? Is this person reacting out of jealousy? This last one is tough because I usually fail to see how anyone could be envious of me. Then I realize my parents are still married, I'm very independent, and I usually succeed in what I set out to do. I don't set out to be better than anyone else, but for those cousins who have been put down all their lives and they don't know how to reclaim personal power, it could seem like I've been showing them up our whole lives. I'm just living my life, not thinking about them at all, and they see every thing I do as an insult to them. I don't think I can solve that problem, but by being aware of it, I can be more careful in how I present myself.

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