For my family, we have created this narrative that we are “unlucky”, but from these unlucky situations we still make light of the situation. On my maternal side, they call it the “Holland luck” and make all their hardships a humorous story because there is always something good that comes out of the bad. They take unfortunate events with a grain of salt. However, my paternal side of the family isn’t as out in the open with it as my maternal side. I believe they use the “unlucky” description of bad situations to try and understand why they keep happening to them. The hardships on my paternal side can’t really be twisted into a funny story like my maternal side can do. My mother told me that luck is essentially what you make of it. With that in mind, I want to tell the story of what makes my family think we are unlucky and how we understand it in context with our story. From my own experiences and my family stories, I have compiled different types of media that have explained how my family has experienced unluckiness to share our story.
While I was originally looking for bad things that have happened to grow the story of us being unlucky, I soon realized in my research that some of these things weren’t so bad and had a good side. My grandmother mentioned in her interview that even though they had terrible vacations, there always seemed to be something good that came out of it. For example, she retold the story of us getting bed bugs in our hotel, but then we were granted new luggage, a limo ride to the amusement park, and all access passes. We wouldn’t have been able to afford that otherwise. However, I also discovered that my family has darker stories than I originally thought. I didn’t realize that my great-great grandpa gambled his entire fortune away which led to some of his children being drafted in the war and my grandpa’s family being dirt poor. Overall, I discovered that we have a happy medium in the family of good and bad, even though we normally have to go through the bad first to experience the good.
From all the information I gathered, I think I want to keep telling the story of the Holland luck. It still exists and we do experience bad situations all the time. But from now on, I think I will look for the good in the situation too, instead of focusing on the bad. To me, it brought a new light to my family. In my life, and in my family's life, there have been a lot of misfortune, but I think I want to make a brighter narrative out of it, instead of just saying we are “unlucky”. We do have bad luck, but we are also a very fortunate family in all the ways that matter. When my dad mentioned that he had to work hard for his degree after he got a second chance, it made me realize that we are fortunate enough to get those second chances. We are fortunate enough to have a loving, hardworking family. Andd we are fortunate enough to have faced all these hardships that have made us stronger and have given us amazing stories to tell.
In my analysis of all these materials, I found that memory plays an important role in how we tell a story. Kuhn explored this in her book, Family Secrets. She said, “Memory work, on the other hand, is potentially interminable; at every turn, as further questions are raised, there is always something else to look into” (pg. 6). I found this true as I continued asking questions and furthered my research. While my original thought was that my family was full of unluckiness, this turned out to be not the entire story. I also know that my grandma sometimes has problems with memory and remembering things. This may affect her story and how she tells it. Kuhn also reminded me that memory tells the story of the untold. She said, “These are the lives of those whose ways of knowing and ways of seeing the world are rarely acknowledged, let alone celebrated, in the expression of a hegemonic culture” (pg. 9). In my family, I think that my paternal grandfather’s story went untold for a while, mainly because he didn’t want to tell it, but also because he wasn’t asked. I think unearthing his story and acknowledging his experiences was valuable to him and myself.
I think stories from the past help us to make sense of our own present stories due to the fact that we can create a bigger picture. I didn’t know much about my grandparent’s lives before I talked with them in depth about it, and it allowed me to make more connections to my present life. Their stories and hardships reflect the people they are today which influence my reality. For example, I tend to take hardships with a grain of salt which was definitely influenced by my grandmother. I also am very hardworking, which allows me to be successful, but this trait was influenced by my father and paternal grandfather. Our family stories influence who we become, whether it is conscious or not. On the flip side, I think our family stories can limit our personal stories. For years I thought that bad things just always happened to our family, and I never saw the good that came out of them until I took an objective point of view with this project. Until I got the full story, I wasn’t truly able to appreciate everything my family has been through. Continuing this, while I didn’t feel much for my distant relatives on my paternal side through my exploration of their story through the draft card, it was still interesting to know. While it may seem like this is insignificant to me, it affected my grandpa’s life and shaped him into the person he is today, which also affects who I am. While we may not feel attached to the people in our family, they still impact us, whether we want them to or not.
This project has been a rollercoaster of discovering my own story and my family’s. It was interesting to investigate my distant relatives on both sides and my immediate family in this. I discovered the ups and downs of many family members, and it helped me rewrite my own story. Going into this project, I thought I was exploring the misfortunes of my family that created the narrative of us being “unlucky”, but I ended up unearthing the fortunate situations that arose from these hardships. While we do still expect bad things to happen, I have started to look for the positives, like the rest of my family does, while also keeping the Holland luck narrative.
Sources:
Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination by Annette Kuhn
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10k1t--t1A04gLUP4AUTQZVEkhJTW5_cXBKIzXqE0TM4/edit?usp=sharing