Thread by @TrulyTafakari

Question:

When does family “grown folks’ business” become *your* business because you are an adult and now a custodian of family history, memories?

I ask because my grandmother passed away in 2013 without me ever feeling “grown” enough to ask her personal questions about her life.

I regret not doing so.

Did your elders ever just sit you down and talk about their life experiences, or did you have to pry it out of them? Or did you never get the chance to do any of that?

Now, with kids of my own, I’m thinking, “ohhhhh crap, who is going to tell them who our people are and where we come from?”

No one ever told me and I was too thoughtless to ask.

I come from a family that is very close-mouthed, very secretive, and not at all forthcoming about family history. To learn about where we come from, as best as they know, I’d have to pry.

And when you grow up distant from a parent, for whatever reason, you can often lose access to a whole side of your family history simply because of that missing bond.

I think about my family’s (unknown) stories a lot now because my oldest daughter is 6. She lives in a state where neither her dad nor I grew up. Our families are not from here. We have no history grounding us to this place.

It will be entirely up to me to connect her to the people and places that make up her ancestry. I feel the import of that responsibility far more keenly than I did before I had children.

And, for myself, I want to know intimately the stories of the people whose blood I share.

So I better get to asking, grown folks’ business or not.

I think this feeling, this hyper awareness of the brevity of life and our tenuous connection with living ancestors…

…this is what it means to feel grown amongst your family’s “grown folks.”

Making their history your business because it’s your history, too.