Flashback: Architecture of a Family

I often like to say that I was born out of season. And my hearers often agree with me. One friend memorably told me (after urging me not to take offense) that he could see me as Little House on the Prairie.

Yep, so could I. I could see myself in quite a few different generations–all of them older than my own.

But the truth is, the family structure I grew up in really was from a different generation than my own.

Linda’s asking us about family structure today…

Prompt: How was your family structured when you were growing up? Did you grow up with both original parents in the home? …Was yours a multi-generational household with grandparents living with you? Did your mom work outside the home, and if so, was it full-time or part-time? Was there a clearly delineated division of labor between your parents (or parent and step-parent) and how traditional was it? Did your parents believe in child labor?! That is, how structured were chores? What responsibility, if any, did you have for things like doing your own laundry, fixing your own school lunch, etc.? Were your parents do-it-yourself-ers or did they hire people for repairs, painting, etc.? …

We were an old-fashioned family in a new-fangled day, a country family in the middle of the city. In the age of increasingly blended families, dual-income households, and latchkey kids, we were a holdout from an earlier age.

Dad worked at “the office”, Mom worked at home.

And I do mean worked. Mom was no welfare queen popping bonbons and watching soaps–and neither was she a harried housewife running children from one event to another. Instead, she homeschooled her seven children, put homecooked meals on the table twice a day (breakfast was cold cereal, usually), and kept a massive garden. Every summer she put up over 200 quarts of tomato products, not to mention the pickles, the beans, the beets, the fruit, and the jam. And then there were the frozen products–corn, especially. On top of that, she sewed much of our clothing and frugally purchased the rest at used stores and garage sales.

Dad bought bikes from police auctions. Mom took them apart and reassembled them into useable bikes for us kids.

We kids roamed the neighborhood on bikes and by foot. We had an 1100 square foot house on an almost 3/4 acre yard. The house was far too small for the nine of us–but the yard made it okay. We swung on the rope swing in the backyard tree, played in our “Eagle’s nest” and made up our own games to play.

That’s not to say that we didn’t work too. We were a country-fied family–there was too much to be done for anyone to sit back and twiddle their thumbs. There was a garden to be hoed, beans to be stemmed, tomatoes or apples to be “squitted”. There was an (enormous) lawn to be mowed with our push mower, to be raked in the fall. There was a long driveway to be shoveled in winter. There was a house to be cleaned and dishes to be done. There was trash to be loaded up and taken to the dump.

Our tasks were a mixture of scheduled chores and things we were simply expected to pitch in with when they had to be done.

In one sense, we were a family of the fifties, when Dad went to work and Mom stayed home with the kids. In another sense, we were a family of long before that, when the family business of farming took every member’s involvement. In many ways, we were a family from every era of recent modern history–every era except our own, that is.

Hear how other families were structured by following the links at Linda’s