CHANGE IN FAMILY VALUES

As the oldest child of my parent’s family, I often think about my roots. How I would like to go back to that day and time once more, and sit around that table with my immediate family. There wasn’t anything tangible there to brag about, except our quality of life. Now I’m going to shock you by telling you the “quality of life” I talk about had nothing to do with the tangible things we equate with it today. Our house, back then, didn’t have much of that. Meals were always on time, but red meat was largely absent. There was no soda in the fridge, and no candy dish. Maybe a homemade cake for a birthday—and there were ten of us, so that was a plus. The house went cold at night when the fire went out. Clothes were mostly hand-me-downs. There was one TV and one phone. “So tell me,” you say, “where was this ‘quality of life?’” I measured quality of life in the love, and character, of my parents and siblings. This example must have stuck, at least with my generation, because the seven surviving siblings are all with the spouses they married, except me—and I am a widower who was married forty-nine years. My father never worried about handouts, he only prayed that someone would always give him a job and let him earn his way. He was one of the hardest working men I ever knew. My mother always made good meals out of little. In the eighteen years I was home, going out to eat never happened unless it was potluck at a church, or a relative’s home. Mom washed clothes for her family and hung them outside to dry—even in the winter. She baked all of our bread, grew a garden, and canned the vegetables. You get the picture. As the oldest, I have seen the births and lives of twenty of my parent’s grandkids and thirty-some great grandkids. I have also seen where that love and respect, our parents demanded from us, has been watered down. We were raised as a Christian family, and that, too, has been lost in some cases. It’s funny how love and respect seems to run off and hide when that leaves. I sometimes wonder what the fourth generation will be like, but I know time will run out for me before then. We’re no different than most families, and I daresay this story could be repeated by anyone of that same era. That the decline of love and respect for each other, the decline in morality and faith in God, the love of power and money, poor work ethic, and an attitude of entitlement was going to happen in this fast changing world. It was going to happen because many people today don’t know anything else. I still wish I could go back and sit with my family, at that table we had in the late 1950’s, knowing what I know today. That I could say to my parents, “You tried so hard to raise us right, and you showed us the right way. I would hope you wanted us all to have a better life than you were able to give us, and for the most part, that happened, but Mom and Dad, somewhere some of us made some trade-offs that ate away at your way of life, and we are living to regret it.”