"Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us."
-Van Wyck Brooks
It's humbling to finally accept that you are the result of something much older and much grander than you originally anticipated. I suppose the curse of immigration is the loss of genetic discourse. It can be almost as confusing for children to be the first in an immigrant family to grow up in a country where they have very little direct genealogy, as it must have been for the immigrant parents themselves. When all you have to stand on is a shrub in a forest of giant redwoods, it's hard not to feel unsupported, ignorant, that all the pressure to grow your leafy green sapling is on you and your siblings. The answers to questions about your appearance and talents were fragmented or lost when your branch was severed from it's ancestor tree.
Such were the answers I expected to simply absorb and piece together when I set foot in Ireland on December 14th. As if by walking where the rest of my bloodline had walked, a door would open in the back of my head and reassuring stories about a distant relative that also liked to paint, or had lips far too big for their face would spill out and pat me on the shoulder. Of course the idea was ambitiously romantic, but so are the rest of my ideas, so it's justified.
In Ireland, I didn't find a painter in the family, or any direct relation to Steven Tyler. What I found was undoubtedly positive, but completely indefinable (and I really did try to get that damn door to burst open). The morning I arrived in Ireland, sitting on a bus on its way into Dublin city, I was a little disturbed. I hadn't prepared myself to bare witness to so many....Irish people. I remember actually laughing a little out loud as I imagined my face on the heads of my fellow passengers and it not looking entirely abnormal. It was as if Ireland was my personal ending to "Being John Malkovich" and it made me a little uncomfortable.
It wasn't until my second week that things began to change. I found a piece of a family I had always known about, but had never met. For the rest of the trip I was able to spend one on one time with men, women and children that belong to the trees that my mother and father left behind. I had never experienced similar unconditional welcome. All they needed to know was that I was the child of their brother, sister or aunt and I was immediately a member of their family. I dug a little into the past, visited childhood homes and looked for evidence of relation in the way my family looked and acted. Let's not call it creepy, just curious.
It was something close to pride that I felt as I sifted through boxes of old photography with my father's sister and her daughter and as I walked along the shores of Blackrock where my mother grew up. I had no idea what my grandfather looked like until I was given an old photo from one of these boxes, and was embarrassed to ask for certain how many siblings my father had. But all aside, that's the charm of the family.
I think after all this, I've started a mission. I've always loved meeting the siblings and parents of good friends for the first time, just to look at their faces and find family features. I love the idea of being an aesthetic product of genetic information and even more so when that information extends beyond parents and into distant ancestry. I expected to look at an old photo of a great grandfather of mine and maybe see my face, but I left uncertain. I need to find what part of the tree I stem from beyond that of my parents. I can see what my parents have given me, but is there an individual I relate to the most in my family's past as well? It's either that or I start looking for mailmen.
