Tag Archives: grandparents

In EL Paso there were people who taught Mom lessons in natural childbirth, people who sewed her maternity clothes that represented her ideals in wearing the clothes she had adopted in Tonga and also were practical and American in other ways. They also gave her a book on natural childbirth, which she read. Mom was eager to practice natural childbirth, to breastfeed and to be a devoted mother to her new child in a very different way than she had been mothered or she had mothered me.   There was a sense that she was  caught up in the plan of God.  

In my mother’s book Go You Are Sent: An Incredible Odyssey of Faith there are many layers in a book I saw her create over many years with careful notes and remembered stories and various drafts. Sometimes she set it aside for years at a time. In time she hired people to help coordinate and edit various drafts. Then it was published and the publisher also edited it. In some ways the book continued to improve, but in other ways it developed a flaw or two. This is evident in the same chapter I have recently quoted, “Navajos to La Cueva”. In that chapter she recounts our arrival in El Paso. 

“Father RIck came to pick us up at the Bus station.His eyes twinkled as he and Frank tossed out Tongan mat into the back of the truck. Here was an attorney turned missionary, his expectant wife, a twelve year old son arriving on a bus, with our few belongings wrapped in a Tongan mat.( Summers 383).”

The point here is that I was born on June 15, 1964. Sarah was born on May 18, 1976. The oldest I could have been when we arrived in El Paso was 11 years old. I was still no older than eleven when we got back to Abbeville and still eleven when Sarah was born. The coming back to Abbeville was marked with joy at the idea of my baby sibling being welcomed into the extended family and also the idea of reuniting with others in that same extended family. But the trip home was not really simple at all, we had left the land and life for a long term missionary life and that time had not been so long. We were returning with no home, Dad did not have a job and Mom was pregnant and pretty far along. It became clearer that it was a time of some confusion for everyone involved as to how we  would fit in at home. I remember my grandparents and aunts and uncles trying to ask me about what my parents intended as they never had before. The school year was almost over. I visited Mount Carmel Elementary School and spent a day or so there without enrolling. I am not sure why or if I was looking at enrolling there in the fall. One person I actually spoke with was my wife today Clara Duhon. It was a pretty good time with some people in the class and others at the school.I had not yet developed the deep sense of unease that was coming. There was some sense of excitement about hearing about my travels and our missionary life. There was also an excitement about our family welcoming a new baby. That is something a few people have reminded me about over the years. “You were so excited to have a new brother or sister coming.” 

At first we stayed with one set of grandparents or another. But then we settled into a garage apartment no longer being rented by Mama Esther, my  Dad’s paternal grandmother. The garage was  the garage for her house and though the lawns and gardens were a bit run down and there was no car in the garage it still had a certain charm and the windows of the apartment were alternately hidden amidst the branches of trees and shrubs or else had views of a nice neighborhood. It was not an air conditioned house. My mother’s sister Rachel and her brother Brucewere each having their second children. The Gremillions called the three first cousins born that year of 1976 The Bicentennial Bunch. Her mother and the womenfolk in her family had fewer baby things to circulate her way than any other year. But a friend gave her a beautiful bassinet and my Dad’s first cousin Laura Lucia Massey gave her a huge box of fine and expensive baby girl clothes, although nobody knew Sarah’s gender. When the baby came I was staying with my grandparents. Mom and Dad went to the hospital, I and others got the news together or separately. I met them there by the night she was born. Mom had to leave her in the hospital with jaundice on Thursday and fight to keep her milk because she could not breastfeed.  But Friday she was able to take the baby back to the apartment. ALong with Sarah’s birth my parents also became more involved in ministry. We also thought we would return to ElL Paso and heard lots of things from them encouraging us and expressing their encouragement from the start.   

 My father, PauPau, came up with the  research about her name. Sarah came from the Hebrew for “Princess”, and Anthea came from a root that meant “of flowers”. The baby to be welcomed in the beautiful bassinet and dressed in very expensive hand-me-down baby clothes was to be called the Princess of Flowers. Mom tells of her struggle to breastfeed. I remember for years she supported the La Leche League and other organizations supporting more breastfeeding in the world that had turned to the bottle.  

I was glad as the little apartment took shape. I spent time with Mama Esther, trying to support my family’s free stay in her apartment by cleaning up the yard, helping her with small errands and clearing out closets and pantries. She was happy to give us old fruit preserves she had canned and things she baked. I would run a few errands to the store. We didn’t has a bike for me or a car for my parents and I was truant for a couple of weeks, we had no TV or air conditioning. WIthout the   acreage of farm and wilderness around us I just felt poor and although we prayed a great deal we seemed to have less of a focus on God’s work than before. The days stretched out before us and we saw the coming of the baby as a new era. 

Right across the street from Mama Esther’s house was my Dad’s Uncle Clay – also known as Uncle ‘Tit (pronounced Tee and meaning little Clay). He was the tough and colorful great uncle who had given me my first gun. He was a difficult man and was not sure we were not taking too many good things out of his mother’s pantry on the one hand. On the other hand he appreciated me picking up trash from under the house and outbuildings, cleaning a birdbath, tidying a  closet or two. He gave me few dollars after a while to do odd jobs and he was somehow able to track down a savings account passbook I had lost. I was able to draw out  a few dollars and buy a few other things for our house.  When school was out, I could walk to the library downtown and read and I did that a good number of times, occasionally seeing other kids I knew and finding a growing distance between us. Over the years I would come back to that place many times.

While there I also met a group of men who occasionally called on Uncle Clay. They had interest in the girl who had grown up in his home, this was the  daughter of Dudley Leblanc Jr., (our Cousin Odile), in my father and grandfather, in Odile’s grandfather and in me. One or two of them tried to teach me some basic Cajun French and I tried to check on the words with Mama Esther. They also told me of how Dudley Leblanc Senior had written books on the Cajun people and their history and was President of the Association of Louisiana Acadians but reminded me that there were other traditions and organizations in which our family were involved that went much further back in time and still mattered to an ever shrinking number  people – but still mattered. 

Under Mama Esther’s magnolia tree they had  talked to me before and after Sarah’s birthin the evening hours a few times and planted seeds that were meant to grow in my mind over time. They did take root  and grow. We walked to Church as a family when Mom was big and pregnant. and we prayed and corresponded with the community in ElL Paso. Overall, I was busy enough but I began to spend long hours just thinking and praying alone and worrying about the future. But I was still very eager to meet my little brother or sister when they came.  But after the baby came, our home in La Cueva was occupied by others, there was no paying ministry or systemic support  and few gifts. Dad began to mow pastures on the family farm charging what anyone else would charge but making less because he had to use tractors and mowers he did not own. I went with him a few times. But I remember being troubled whe the huge machines cut up a rabbit or even a mouse in the big fields. Killing for food was one thing but that was something else. We were really poor and I did what I could to care for Sarah and support my parents and field questions about why Dad did not go back to practicing law. The baby thrived but was a bit collicky. There were periods when only I could stop her crying, that made me feel special. 

Many people had a kind of respect for some part of our lives. Some respected Mom breastfeeding when few did, Some respected our stories and mementoes of work in the missions. Some respected the teaching and preaching my parents got to do in marriage prep courses. But what nobody did was feel called to organize support for us in the way that many in ministry were supported. For me there was a sense of anxiety about how our lives would turn out if we had given up what we had once been and did not find our path back into the life in which we were called. Eventually, Dad ran out of pastures to mow and we still had no clear plans. I had run out of most of the little one time jobs I had been doing. The school year was approaching.    

We went to spend some time in the mansion where my Dad’s parents lived in New Orleans and Sarah cried almost incessantly. We watched the magnificent displays of the fourth of July bicentennial fireworks in New York and Washington D.C. on the television with my Grandparents and it was pretty memorable. I remember wondering what it would be like to find a new way of life for ourselves in America.  But although my grandfather hoped Dad might clerk for him on the Supreme Court of Louisiana that did not happen. We got the news  that one of the feelers Dad had put out to an exciting group of American Christians influenced by spiritual experiences similar to our own. They were living a passion for Christian Renewal. FInally the invitation came for us to got there and we set out to do so. 

I am not sure how long we where in New Orleans but the days were long because of Sarah’s constant wailing. I put her to sleep more successfully than the badly stressed adults many times but also failed many times to comfort her. Sarah’s colic never really let up until we arrived in Alleluia Community in Faith VIllage in Augusta, Georgia. Dad had corresponded with them and we had been invited to go and see the way they lived the renewal and the gospel in community. The people who had been our last bridge back to El Paso had been unable to accept us due to one of them having a sudden heart attack.I think for me as we waited to make our next move I was deeply conflicted. I wanted to be a great missionary saint, I wanted to be a good brother and son. I wanted to be able to fit in and I wanted to write. But I also wanted to be true to my own personal and family history and heritage. .