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I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine about the things her mother says to her.  At 47, her mom still feels the need to tell her how to screw her toothpaste cap on. It’s the smallest thing; my friend, quite understandably annoyed, says thanks and keeps moving along.  “No wonder you feel like you don’t have any self worth,” I say to her. Her whole life she has been told every little thing that she didn’t do right. It pains me to hear her talk about it, but it makes me understand her a little bit more. Yes, now it makes sense, of course she can’t see herself in any light except the words that have made her.

As I have started to look through my heritage, I find myself thinking more often about what words have been used to shape the generations before me and how they have trickled down to create the person I am. My mom  told me that the reason that she called her grandfather, “Daddy Pop” was because he would “pop” them if they didn’t mind their manners. Her mom probably exhibited the same behavior as his father, and my mom was also a stickler for manners and for etiquette. Obviously, we are all products of our childhood, but with thousands of sheets of paper with family information in front of me, I realize a few things that I may have inherited genetically or I may have  learned from the generations before me.

I haven’t been able to determine yet what made my great grandmother, Cat, so fanatical about tracing our family roots. As I look through pages and pages of writings, I know that this genealogy was a project passed down from generation to generation. Most of the pages go unsigned; however the handwriting changes, the ink type differs, paper become more brittle. The words are hurried and important. Perhaps her mother, Ruth Anne Robertson, (my great great-grandmother) found it interesting, possibly even her mother’s mother, Theodosia Sims (my third great grandmother) had started this tradition of research and project managing.  I did not know the aforementioned women, but I do know their descendants and the same obsessive construction of projects are hallmarks of the direct line of women who followed them. I contemplate what else has been passed down from these generations.

I spoke with my grandmother, yesterday. I call her about once a week on my drive into work. She has never been much of a phone person. I don’t remember speaking to her often as a child from the phone accept on birthdays and holidays. However, her voice has always comforted me. I enjoy these calls. They make me feel connected and I like to hear her voice in the mornings. She tells me about what her cats are doing and how the birds are right outside her window. These conversations makes me smile. Yes, this is what you should do at the age of 82.

Grandmother has also always been there to help me. I remember calling her from my dorm room at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, asking for help on a sociology paper twenty years ago. She told me about living in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1950s. She remembers seeing a bus shoved over because the riders were not white. I made an A on the paper.

Just a few short years later, without a diploma in hand, I would get married at too young of an age to a man much older and not wiser by any means. She was there. When I had a baby a year later, she came to my house and realized that my refrigerator was not working, she bought me a new one. I still have it in my house 16 years later. When my baby needed glasses, when I graduated college finally, when I got divorced and fought for my daughter, she was there -sending a check, attending graduation, listening to my anguish. And when I got remarried, she would celebrate with me the delight of finally finding my way.

Grandmother and I have started to work through her mother’s life work on these weekly phone calls. Catharine Robertson Sheils or Grandmother Cat, as we have always called her, was a writer, a project manager, a genealogist, a healer and so many other things. My grandmother and her brother have often said that I am a lot like Grandmother Cat. I imagine that this process will prove how much we are alike or different. Till then, I savor the time I have talking to my Grandmother.