Family Plants

My Tradescantia zebrina plant, also known as Wandering Dude, is thriving now, its creeping stems filled out with bright bluish-green leaves, with darker green stripes down the center and sides of the leaf. The stems spill over the top of the pot and rise energetically toward the light.

It's not always this way. Toward the end of winter the Dude, in the cycle of many green living things, will grow leggy and listless as the leaves closest to the soil die, while the leaves closer to the tips of the stems lighten to pale green. I will need to take cuttings and then consign the plant to the compost pile. The cuttings root easily in water, and by spring I will have potted another generation of the Dude.

A couple of winters ago I was down to one pot of sickly looking plant before I took the cuttings, weak and floppy. It was a "can this plant be saved?" moment. Maybe it was time for some education in the care and feeding of houseplants. I've always done it by guesswork, which works well enough, and when a plant dies it's no big deal. As a friend once told me, "I have a houseplant budget. I will eventually end up killing them, and then I just replace them."

But the Wandering Dude is different. If I kill the last propagation of this plant, I will have destroyed a bit of my family heritage. Years ago, in the 1990s or maybe the early aughts, I brought home from Arkansas a cutting given to me by one of my mother's many cousins. The story is that the original plant belonged to my mother's maternal grandmother, Flora Catherine "Katie" Joslin Baker (1865-1942), who lived and farmed her entire life in Carroll County, Arkansas.

Katie Baker's daughter, my grandmother, after retiring from teaching in a one-room schoolhouse, researched my mother's family tree and started digging into my father's, too. As a child I read her 21x26-inch pedigree chart, on which she had typed the names with their dates and places of birth and death, tracing one branch back to the first American ancestor, born in Virginia in 1697.

The genealogy research bug passed from my grandmother to my father, who continued branches back to the early 1600s in England and Holland, and forward into the 1990s. Then it passed to two of my nieces, each of whom has made some surprising discoveries.

Historically, my family has valued the appearance of things, the public face of the family in view of the larger community, and especially the face of this nuclear family in view of the extended family. The myth of the ideal family – Mom, Dad, and typical children – was regarded as truth, and therefore secrecy was required to cope with any deviation.

This was a common pattern in the past, and still is today. Google, social media, and widespread DNA testing have revealed an astonishing number of family secrets. Nearly everyone I talk with about this has a story – of a child given up for adoption who grows up and finds the parent, or a parent who turns out to be not biologically related to the child, or a parent who had a whole other family that no one knew about. Witness the recent publication of Kerry's Washington's memoir Thicker Than Water, in which she reveals her own family secret.

These are stories of children whose biological origins were hidden by parents who felt strongly the value of secrecy, usually in service to the myth of the nuclear family.

Real families are complicated, and so are family stories. The myth said that the "normal" nuclear family was necessary for the wellbeing of children, but the truth is that many children thrive in single-parent, same-sex-parent, and other families, while many children don't thrive in families that adhere to the myth.

I've come around to believing that family life can be cyclical, if we allow it to be. There can be times when a child's beliefs and/or behaviors are intensely challenging to parents (some teenagers come to mind), and later, after a few cycles of the sun, the same child has a close, loving relationship with the parents while still being their own, unique self. It doesn't always turn out this way, but often enough that the family ties are worth keeping intact, even when it feels like they are broken beyond repair.

What is necessary is a commitment to nurturing those ties through the winters of the cycle, always hoping that, like the almost-dead stems of my Wandering Dude plant, the family will come to life again in the spring.