Come forth!

Readers and relatives – come forth! 

The time has come to confess. Writing a blog is much more difficult than one might think. It can also be quite boring if no one provides feedback. Throwing your thoughts out into the ether is easy enough, but realizing that they linger there, lonely and cold, can be a deterrent to sending any further envoys. I can see both sides of the equation and provide a multitude of excuses for both readers and potential respondents, because I am guilty of using them myself: summer, laziness, other projects, work, family, travel.

The lesson is: never give up. As in any project, initial enthusiasm may wane if no relatives respond to a Facebook page you have set up to unite them and make your plans accessible. Have I actually contacted some or any of them to tell them clearly what my expectations are? As in any form of teamwork, I am responsible for providing some leadership, guidelines and examples.

My sister’s sister-in-law Birute Mikenas on her parents’ tobacco farm in Tillsonburg, Ontario

Even while a project simmers on a back burner, inspiration may come in strange and unsolicited ways. Research on an article for Lithuanian Heritage Magazine about Lithuanian tobacco farmers in Southern Ontario renewed my interest in refining information about my own ties to that area – I spent most summers of my early youth there with an aunt and uncle. When someone mentions Delhi, it creates an immediate understanding of a whole other lifestyle than I knew in the city. It evokes seeing vast fields of giant-leaved tobacco plants, the unforgettable smell of tobacco drying in kilns, and praying for rain, but please – no hail…

This in turn encourages me to write down the names of the people I knew, talk to others who knew them, tell their story before it’s too late. Many of our elders are gone, so we rely on cousins and old acquaintances to help remember or connect the sketches of our past. Why is it important? Most likely because our true roots are overseas, and we have little or no “proof” of it in our hands, as do some of our friends whose families handed down homesteads and histories in what seems to be the here and now as opposed to a distant, foreign past. We lack a real connection with it, unless our parents made supreme efforts to educate us about that past and gave us opportunities to go back there.

The question then is — why do we search for our roots? Why is it important? I offer this as a starting point for a discussion. In my view, for children of immigrants living in a country of immigrants it is particularly meaningful to have a sense of connection to something more permanent than ourselves, something unique. The desire for permanence may be particularly important to the children of refugees. A person born and raised in Lithuania does not have to prove they are Lithuanian – it’s inherent, like the colour of their eyes. In Canada, Lithuanians are judged by whether or not they speak Lithuanian and how well, which wave of immigration they hail from, and how they are connected to the Community. We strive to display or explain our heritage and our interest in it. Why? One reason may be a need to portray our uniqueness in a giant mosaic of ethnicities, or – in a mass of average Canadians (if there is such a group, referred to in the US as “Middle America”).

Finally, and mostly, defining our connections with our family network and history can give us and our children a satisfying context and a sense of inclusion in a vast anonymous world.

This post is also available in: EN