|
|
             |
Memories Around the Holiday Table © Belinda Gore, Ph.D., 2003 As I prepare for Christmas dinner, setting the table with my mother’s Wedgewood china that she bought before she married my father in 1948 and the engraved silver from Cleveland that once belonged to my mother-in-law, I am easily drawn into memories of Christmases past. Unlike the ghost that haunted Scrooge, the characters who people my memories are funny and infuriating, full of sweet and maddening traits that I now know are classic Enneagram stories. So I thought I would invite you pull up a chair in front of the fireplace with me and reminisce about the family members who have gathered around the holiday table over the years. Let’s begin with my great-grandmother Sarah, the matriarch of my mother’s family and a quintessential One. She died when I was nineteen at the remarkable age of 98. Born in Kentucky she never traveled far from home but had high standards for herself and her family. When she was a girl she was enraged by the modest cornhusk doll her mother made for her Christmas present and threw it under the house. She confessed to my mother that her greatest sin was using a goose quill as a straw to sip from the jugs of her father’s home brew in the cellar when she was a girl. The stories I remember are of her flower gardens (that she faithfully tended until a few years before she died), her impeccable biscuits, and how she would order everyone around. In the election of 1960, when she was ninety, she watched the Democratic and Republican conventions with the eye of a hawk, taking in every nuance of character of Nixon and Kennedy and preaching to the family about the state of the world. What a role model for the five generations of women that have followed her. Moving around the Enneagram circle to Two, we come to my mother Sara, named after her grandmother. When Mother died five years ago, my father coined the epithet “Inspiring Teacher” for her tombstone. She was a helper--of school children, family members, neighborhood neurotics, and most of the civic organizations in our small town. It was hard to emancipate from her, good little Three that I was, wanting to please her and overly sensitive to her hurt feelings. We danced for years trying to find the balance between my need for independence and her need to have me be her loving daughter and her pride and joy. I wonder if my uncle Charles was a Three like me. My cousin Mike, his older son, is. Charles was a horse-trainer and trader, who made quite a place for himself in the world of Tennessee Walking Horses. He was always working and was proud of his trophies as well as of the deals he made with people from all over the country. Every time I visited as an adult he tried to sell me a horse, too. He built a big house for his family up the hill from my grandmother’s house. No one talked much about the fact that he pretty much took what he wanted and talked his way out of a lot of shady spots. Not the Tom Cruise variety of Three, perhaps, but image conscious and competitive nonetheless. My aunt Maxine is the family Four, an artist who left Kentucky to eventually go to art school in Chicago, where she met a German architect, married, and raised four children along the shores of Lake Michigan in a very progressive community. As she said to me not long ago, in her day it was a prize to marry someone “who would take care of you”; it has been my experience with Four’s that earning a living in an ordinary way is, well, just too ordinary. Maxine is the gourmet cook in the family and the one who has carried on the family tradition of quilting. She keeps alive a fantasy picture of the family, sharing her political opinions and regrets about her own life, but in a funny way never revealing her deepest feelings. Peter is Maxine’s oldest son and is a lovely Five. People have described him as an aging hippie because of his long hair and commitment to environmental issues and “new age” philosophies. Currently he designs web sites (having a Four wing) and has survived on his expertise in creating fonts for computers for graphic design folks. One year he studied chiseling letters into stone in Wales. He was able to pay his debts off a few years ago when a company bought his URL “dol.com.” He plays the Irish flute and classical guitar and lives in an artsy small town in western Illinois. I still call him Eric, his birth name, and love to talk with him about astrology and the new physics and just about any other data based, unusual topic I can think of. There are plenty of Sixes to choose from in my family, including my dad, my cousin Owen, probably my cousin Randy, my aunt Pat, and my uncle Hans. My father is a great example of the loyal, traditional, hardworking Six. He was the middle child in a family of seven children who grew up during the Depression, but he was the one who, at seventeen, took over managing the family farm and looking after his mother and younger brother and sister after his father died. When he went into the Army at nineteen he was shipped to the Phillipines and moved up the ranks to First Sargeant because he could be depended upon to organize his fellow soldiers and get the job done. Throughout his life he has attended to his civic duty and even now is a responsible member of his international caravanning organization. A Social Six, he has friends around the world and writes nearly 100 Christmas cards each year. It was hard on him when my mother died because he was still deeply committed to her after 51 years of marriage. I have discovered from my daily phone conversations with him that he needs someone to talk over the things that worry him. Given enough time with someone he trusts he can resolve any problem and has the courage to follow through with whatever he believes is the right thing to do. Uncle Harold is the Seven stereotype. Tall, handsome, and flamboyant, he has been a dancing teacher, a professor of speech and theatre, an antique collector, and a gardener with energy that seemed never to stop. His flowerbeds took up over an acre of land and surrounded the pens where he kept exotic fowl. Harold always knows all of the family gossip and always has tales to tell. Sadly, he is having a recurrence of his lung cancer but recently went to Las Vegas for four days before coming home to start chemotherapy. Irrepressible. At 87 my aunt Marjorie is the oldest of my mother’s nine siblings who are still living. Despite the fact that she is crippled with scoliosis, painfully hunched over like the fairytale images of the old woman with a wart on her nose who lived in the woods, Marjorie still lives alone in the old family house and climbs the stairs every night to her bedroom. Despite the family’s efforts to convince her to move to the downstairs bedroom, at least, she stubbornly refuses, saying that if you give in to little inconveniences, pretty soon you will just die. She is determined to keep old age from winning, still drives a car—the neighbors say they know her schedule and keep off the road when she heads for town—and says she will consider getting help “when she needs it.” Anyone else would have been in a nursing home years ago. My childhood memories of her are as a tall elegant woman with a strong chin and a stubborn will, whose home and clothes were beautiful and the very best she could afford. The marble-topped antique table and the rose damask draperies are still there. I wish her determination could straighten her back and ease her pain. Finally we come around to Nine and my grandmother, Ollie Mae, who was an Irish lass of fourteen when she married my grandfather. I don’t know how many times she was pregnant; there were many miscarriages in addition to the ten living children she bore. She was easygoing and full of love, with a mischievous sparkle in her eye. Her mother, my great-grandmother Sarah, lived with her after my grandfather died when Ollie was only 46. She loved her brood of boys and girls, and the grandchildren that came later, and believed the best she could offer was the opportunity for us all to indulge ourselves. Comfort foods were her specialty. While she never had much money, hugs and kisses were rained upon us in abundance. I remember staying with her for a week when I was about four and my parents took a trip with my aunt and uncle. The night they were to return I must have asked her every five minutes when they would arrive. She kept on with her crocheting and calmly nodded, “Directly.” I have a photograph of me sitting on the arm of her chair in my wedding gown, just before the ceremony, and we are laughing. She died the following year. I will always hear her calming me with her quiet words, “Directly, honey, directly.” Well, we have come around the holiday table with my collection of Enneagram stories of family members from Christmases past and present. Thank you for joining me. May your holidays be merry and bright, and may your memories be laced with Enneagram insights for years to come. |
| ©2002 Enneagram Institute of Central Ohio | |
