Found Family
Jan. 23rd, 2021 05:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marmota_b I've just had a lightbulb moment of realising that maybe one of the reasons I'm so into Found Family elements in stories is because it happened in my own family.
I grew up with mom's stories of Grandma Š. who was a bit of a touchstone - and anecdote - for old-fashioned femininity in the stories of my childhood. Grandma Š. was the one with ideas of how a proper lady behaved. We have vintage linens from Grandma Š. that have that quality of really proper vintage linens. (Finding a duvet cover with the respective initials in my stack of old torn linens to possibly turn into costumes is what jumpstarted this train of thought and I suddenly realize that duvet cover may be getting close to around 80 or 90 years old... and is still of better quality than many a newer one.) Grandma Š. was the one wearing old-fashioned underwear that years later my mom would tell me about to paint a picture of the past. I have a vague suspicion that some of the antique sewing supplies I got from my grandma originally came from Grandma Š.
Over the years, I gradually pieced together the story of my Great-Grandma Š. who, it turns out, was not a blood relative at all.
The bare bones of the story are roughly this:
Mrs Š. lost her daughter when her daughter was about twenty and about to get married.
My grandma lost her mother when she was young.
Years later, when Mrs Š. was a lonely old lady with a fairly large house with a garden she had no one to bequeath to, and she was getting frail, there was (I think in the same church?) this young motherless girl just getting married who didn't really yet have any proper place to live and to raise the family she wanted. So Mrs Š. had a proposal: The young couple could move in with her, and take care of her in her waning days, and they could keep the house and basically become Mrs Š.'s sole beneficiaries. And Mrs Š. would spend her last days with a young family instead of lonely.
Her last days turned out to be quite a number of years, and it's not difficult to imagine having young people and children around her had something to do with that. (Also, my grandma was a nurse - well, pediatric nurse, but still a nurse - and my grandpa was a dental technician so Mrs Š. was definitely a clever old lady.)
It's a rather weird arrangement on one hand, but on the other hand that's how my mom grew up with two grandmas after all.
It's one of those things that are par for the course for you when you're a child and that only slowly sink in as you grow up.
So... yeah. I guess I'm into Found Family and Mandalorian concepts of family and I am writing that odd but very real family arrangement Frank and Methos and my OC Ondra have because... to me, it's par for the course to have a Great-Grandma who wasn't a blood relative and to thus have heirlooms from someone who wasn't a blood relative so... duh.
I grew up with mom's stories of Grandma Š. who was a bit of a touchstone - and anecdote - for old-fashioned femininity in the stories of my childhood. Grandma Š. was the one with ideas of how a proper lady behaved. We have vintage linens from Grandma Š. that have that quality of really proper vintage linens. (Finding a duvet cover with the respective initials in my stack of old torn linens to possibly turn into costumes is what jumpstarted this train of thought and I suddenly realize that duvet cover may be getting close to around 80 or 90 years old... and is still of better quality than many a newer one.) Grandma Š. was the one wearing old-fashioned underwear that years later my mom would tell me about to paint a picture of the past. I have a vague suspicion that some of the antique sewing supplies I got from my grandma originally came from Grandma Š.
Over the years, I gradually pieced together the story of my Great-Grandma Š. who, it turns out, was not a blood relative at all.
The bare bones of the story are roughly this:
Mrs Š. lost her daughter when her daughter was about twenty and about to get married.
My grandma lost her mother when she was young.
Years later, when Mrs Š. was a lonely old lady with a fairly large house with a garden she had no one to bequeath to, and she was getting frail, there was (I think in the same church?) this young motherless girl just getting married who didn't really yet have any proper place to live and to raise the family she wanted. So Mrs Š. had a proposal: The young couple could move in with her, and take care of her in her waning days, and they could keep the house and basically become Mrs Š.'s sole beneficiaries. And Mrs Š. would spend her last days with a young family instead of lonely.
Her last days turned out to be quite a number of years, and it's not difficult to imagine having young people and children around her had something to do with that. (Also, my grandma was a nurse - well, pediatric nurse, but still a nurse - and my grandpa was a dental technician so Mrs Š. was definitely a clever old lady.)
It's a rather weird arrangement on one hand, but on the other hand that's how my mom grew up with two grandmas after all.
It's one of those things that are par for the course for you when you're a child and that only slowly sink in as you grow up.
So... yeah. I guess I'm into Found Family and Mandalorian concepts of family and I am writing that odd but very real family arrangement Frank and Methos and my OC Ondra have because... to me, it's par for the course to have a Great-Grandma who wasn't a blood relative and to thus have heirlooms from someone who wasn't a blood relative so... duh.
