How to Launch a Teen: Learning the Cha-Cha-Cha, Learning the Waltz

Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible - the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family.  (Virginia Satir)

Today you are continuing to add to the Action PotentiaList for the first goal you selected for your Five Year Plan.

I'm thinking about my grandmother today, my Nana.  She had no adolescence.  She was married shortly after she had her first period.  My mother was born when Nana was 13, three months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  By age 16, she had given birth to twins and watched them die of pneumonia.  She went from Alabama to California with her husband, her two younger brothers, and my mother.  They worked as crop pickers...cotton, fruit trees...until both Nana and my grandfather got manufacturing jobs with defence contractors.  She divorced and remarried.  (Divorce was rare in the early 1950s, divorced women were outcasts.)  She went on business trips to New York.

Then something happened in her life between 1962 and 1964.  I can remember her living in a big house with a pool before we went to the Phillippines.  After we got back, she and Jim were in Alabama living in a trailer.  After my dad died in 1965, they moved to Louisiana to be closer to us.  When I would sleep over, she would let me dress up in one of her 1950s cocktail dresses, we would play music, and we would dance on the front porch in the moonlight.  Nana taught me the cha-cha-cha.  Jim taught me how to waltz.  They were my favorite people in the world.  Jim died in 1966. 

I stayed with Nana every chance I got.  I was her favorite grandchild.  I had some sense that it was unfair that my brothers didn't get to stay with her as much as I did, but I didn't care.  She read Of Mice and Men to me when I was 10.  We discussed world religions and the supernatural and where she was when JFK was shot.  She made me homemade hot chocolate.  We gardened together and baked cobblers and made lists of what we wanted to get done every day.

I wish I could have shared Trippy Roads Ranch with her.  She would have loved it here.  Although her first priority would have been to build a chicken coop.  And she would never have pulled up all those impatiens.