This week I lost a family member who was near and dear to my heart. I didn’t have a strong relationship with her as an adult, but I spent countless moments with her as a child. She was my great aunt (my grandmother’s sister). For those of you who don’t know me, I am originally from a small town outside of Huntsville, Alabama. My grandmother pretty much became a second mother to me after my parent’s divorce. She picked me up from school most days, we spent weekends at her house, and even now I talk to her at least once a week. She is one of ten children, almost all of whom live within a 1 mile radius of one another.

On my mother’s side alone I easily have over 100 cousins.

Imagine holidays filled with good food at a plethora of homes, walking through any front door without calling first. Because #FullerHouse, it was literally always open. Picking blackberries near the mailboxes, feeding dinner scraps to my uncle’s goats next door, and patrolling the street with my older cousins, trying to look cool. I have so many great memories of home, most are are real. The rest? Well, this weekend I realized that they were extensions of actual memories that at some point I dreamed up and held myself responsible for mimicking.

I often reference Proverbs 31 and the kind of woman that the reading makes me want to be.

When I think of that woman, I think of my grandmother and my mother. I think of being a child of those women and how amazing my life became as a result. Below are 5 things I thought I had to do or be to carry on the matriarchal responsibilities of the women who came before me. Also, the realizations I had about those things this weekend.

1. I need to live within walking distance, or at least within a 30-minute drive from my entire family.

I associate the closeness of family by the literal amount of space that is between us. We have been loving our new home in Michigan, snow included, for the past several months. But the more we enjoy it, the more guilt I began to feel. I thought I could be destroying or weakening relationships with my siblings. I wondered what our holidays would look like . What if someone got sick or even died? Well, someone did die. And I quickly learned on our 24 hour round trip drive with two babies, accompanied with a 36 hour stay a Hotel Grandma, that if you want to make a way, you can. Through God, you can.

As only the Holy Spirit kept my husband and I awake for such a long drive and such little recovery time, I knew that distance couldn’t destroy our family unless we allowed it to.

2. It’s my job to keep our family together

My grandmother’s house seems to always be filled with people, laughter, and love. She is the glue that binds us. The point of reference we can always go back to. In my mind, I thought I needed to be that way too. Here’s the thing though, our grandparents grew up in an entirely different time. They had different schedules, less student loan debt, and more family nearby. People were always together because people didn’t have the means to travel or the need to move far away.

Especially, in my family’s case. Black families had no idea what leaving the safety of what they knew or the land they owned could mean. What if they ended up in towns where they may not have been accepted or easily found work? Not to take away from my grandmother’s essence at all, but she did not create that joyful atmosphere from my memories by chasing people down to make Christmas plans or scheduling her daughter’s dedication around 20 people’s schedules (definitely not talking about myself here). The atmosphere was part of her every day life.

3. My grandmother would give me all of her secret recipes, just like all the sitcoms told me she would

This one is funny, because in this way I am just like my grandmother. She doesn’t have any recipes to pass down to me because she barely writes them down! When she does write them down, she changes them nearly every time anyway. This goes for baking, cooking, you name it. I finally found peace in the fact that I am building my own cookbook for my family. While her Red Velvet Cake recipe is EVERYTHING, maybe it’s time to pass down my own traditions and using hers as a foundation to get started.

4. When your grandmother dies, your family falls apart.

I watched as my cousins buried their grandmother and their parents buried their mother. As I cried during the funeral, it was for the loss of my aunt, but also for the wrenching feeling in my gut that one day we would have to bury my grandmother as well. What would we do? What are they doing? How were they even functioning and sitting through this funeral?

Each of my aunt’s daughters wore one of her church hats – all different and complimenting them beautifully. My cousins, though sad, continued to smile and uplift their own children. People came from all over to pay their respects – the church actually ran out of food at the repass for the first time ever. The warmest of hugs were given, smiles overpowered tears as the family recognized old friends and families who traveled to support them.

They were still bonded together.

Maybe now they all spend holidays at different homes, maybe they still gather at their family home. Perhaps now when a new baby is born they all come to the hospital, maybe some don’t see the baby until a few weeks or months later. Maybe, that’s just the reality of the world we live in. It doesn’t make us any more or less connected. It makes us people who have different priorities, but family who will always be there when it counts. Even if we get there a little late.

5. I don’t know who I am without my grandmother as a benchmark

This was the scariest thought that came across my mind during my turn to drive the long way back to Michigan. I have always been a person who has a list of goals. For most of my teen and early adult years I planned to get married, have kids, finish college, get a master’s degree, start working, and be involved in church. I guess I planned to do all that before I turned 30, but never thought I actually would. Here I am, about to turn 28 and I have done everything on my list. Not only that, but my ideas of what I wanted to be in the future in these new roles have basically shattered.

As I listened to people talk about my aunt at her funeral, it dawned on me that I had such a naive idea of her life, of my grandmother’s life. I imagined them getting up every day, hanging out at the thrift store, feeding the homeless, making cakes and pies for fun, calling all their friends to catch up, taking care of their grandkids and just…being ideal motherly role models. As I listened at the funeral, I realized that…this wasn’t the case at all.

I had been comparing myself at 27 to the 80+ year old matriarchs in my family.

They did struggle, work, get home late, go to church when they were sick, have misbehaved children and issues in their marriages. Both had to figure out how to multitask, got embarrassed about being pregnant (and married mind you) while having a child under 1 already at home, burned a pie, and had thoughts they they weren’t enough. They may have lived the same life I live today. But at this point in their lives, the matriarchs are filling their days to keep their minds active and off of their health.

Our matriarchs social so often on the phone with friends or at church because their friend’s have health issues or are widowed. They spend a lot of time praying for their families and waiting anxiously to hear about our young and exciting lives to proudly tell their friends about. I still managed to ramble a bit, but here is my point: the matriarchs in our family are powerful women to emulate. However, as women, we need to be realistic about who we are really supposed to be imitating (Jesus) instead of comparing ourselves to the Stepford Wives standard of wifehood and motherhood.

It’s time for us to take a step back and shape an identity all our own.

The other day I picked up Luke 10:40-42* in my reading. I encourage you (along with myself) not to be distracted by trivial things like those that come with the thoughts of becoming a rising matriarch or just with being a woman period. We must keep our focus on Jesus so that through him we can form and grow a relationship with God. If we do that, there’s no way we can fail at any role God has called us to perform in. Men make our own plans, but it is God who establishes them. It is HIM who orders our steps. It is HIM we are trying to please and HIS standards we strive to meet. 

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⁴⁰ But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

⁴¹ “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, ⁴² but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”