Swan Mom: May 2016

Note: I wrote this several years ago. I am posting it now because May is the time we honor our female forebears, and also to celebrate my Grandma Barnes' upcoming birthday – she will turn 90 next week.

I was eight when I found out that my parents are cousins. I was standing at my mother's feet, enjoying the natural invisibility that makes children proficient eavesdroppers, as she explained it to a friend. "We probably should never have gotten married," she said, laughing.

I found myself quite indignant. What were you thinking? I shrieked inside. You don't marry your cousin! Even I know that!

As it turned out, they aren't first cousins – nothing so Old-Testament-times as that – but my father's great-grandfather and my mother's great-great grandfather are the same man. This makes my genealogy tilt strangely, the lines pulling together in places, like a sweater with a flaw in the knitting. Second-cousins-once-removed, I learned years later, is the proper label for my parent's relationship. (This means that I'm my own second-cousin-twice-removed, a fact I find amusing if not highly singable.)

It is the “once removed” aspect of this pedigree that has been most consequential in my life, because it means that I had the experience of growing up with grandmothers who, as first cousins once removed, literally came from two different generations.

My mother's mother, Elizabeth Barnes, was thirty-nine when I was born. My paternal grandmother, Lenore Measom, was forty when she gave birth to my father. I was the first grandchild for one family, perhaps the fortieth for the other. My uncle and my grandmother were classmates in high school.

Because my two grandmothers largely followed the paths laid out for them by the times in which they lived, they led notably different lives, despite having being born and raised within a few miles of each other. Knowing them both as I did put me in the privileged position of having an insider's view of two slices of history. I am only now beginning to see how enriching this was for me.

One gave birth seven times, every time in her home. The other had her four children in a hospital. One worked at her husband's side every day on their farm, while one wore a suit to go to work in an office.

One found a soldier in World War II: she met and married my grandfather while he was stationed in Salt Lake City. The other lost a soldier – her oldest son – in that same war.

One lived in the same house from the time of her marriage until her death, while the other has moved several times, each time to a nicer home, in upwardly-mobile fashion. One was a widow as long as I knew her, while the other is still comfortably married.

My younger grandmother, Grandma Barnes, is a strong believer in fitness and does aerobics regularly. Grandma Measom would have been dumbfounded at the idea of created exercise. She labored hard all her life, and if she had any leisure time, she would not have spent it trying to get her heart rate into its target zone.

Both were thrifty, although in different ways. Grandma Barnes loves a bargain and can hear a clearance sale downtown calling to her from her kitchen. Grandma Measom was of the “make it do or do without” school. My father told me how she once pulled up her living room carpet, which was very worn in the middle, and cut it in half, then swapped the halves and sewed them back together with a needle and thread. I was delighted with her ingenuity and struck with a desire to do something equally resourceful.

Despite their differences, though, as a child I saw both simply as loving, attentive grandmothers, which was all that really mattered to me.

I was influenced by their expectations for me, though their hopes were somewhat different. Grandma Barnes frequently told me how smart I was; how she knew that I could be anything I wanted to be. On the other hand, Grandma Measom was often heard to say that she didn't want her children and grandchildren to be smart, or rich, or good-looking, or admired by the world, but that she only wanted them to be good people who loved their families and loved the Lord. (At her funeral, my father shared this about her, then added, “I stand before you today as a testimony that the first part of her wish, at least, came true.”)

I was impressed by their faith through difficult times. I was struck by their strong work ethic, although their work was not the same. They both loved flowers and music and good food and family, and so do I.

The time in which I was raised was different from that of either of my grandmothers, or of my mother. I have choices they didn't have, luxuries they didn't expect, pressures they didn't face. Even on days when I long for a simpler time, I am grateful to live in this season. More than that, though, I am grateful for the women whose heritage and example have equipped me to live in it well.

My Paternal Grandmother, Lenore Measom

Grandma and Grandpa Measom standing outside their home.

My Paternal Grandparents, Lenore and Ty Measom.
(Interesting fact: My husband's great-grandfather performed their
marriage and sealing in the Salt Lake Temple in 1922.)