Nana Keller, my great-grandmother is the five-foot even, 85-pound, matriarch of the family. After surviving 97 years and three generations of Keller offspring, she is completely sound of mind and body. This is why I was so confused on my eighteenth birthday when she pulled me aside to have a private word.
‘You’re getting so grown-up,’ she clucked while patting my hand in that way that old people always do when they’re talking to you. I smiled and said something along the lines of ‘thank-you’, being the gracious and perfect great-granddaughter that I am. Feeling that the conversation was over and my birthday-hostess duties had been met for the day, I moved to turn away from her. But she held on. Tight.
My Nana pulled me in close. Very close. So close that an unusual amount of Chanel No 5 found its way up my nose at an alarming pace. As I looked down at my petite and loving great-grandmother, I could see where her curls were set in perfect white ringlets on top of her scalp. I saw the individual strokes of pencil where her eyebrows were meant to be and where the eyeliner had strayed dangerously far from her eyelid. Then she spoke to me with more authority than twenty professors.
‘I was pregnant with your grandfather by the time I was eighteen.’
I’ll never forget those words. She didn’t say it out of nostalgia or shock or even as a tale of caution. She said it plainly, as a statement—or even as a challenge that I had not met. The words shocked me, to say the least, and as she slowly walked away I could almost catch her looking to my empty womb and barren left-ring finger in simultaneous confusion and disappointment.
This only seems strange if you don’t know my family’s history of settling down early in life. After my great-grandparents married barely out of puberty, my grandparents were engaged by the time they were nineteen. Even my parents had met one another in college and were dating for many years before they were married at twenty-five. It’s a ridiculous and unintentional legacy to be a part of, a legacy one could only assume would die out in these modern times.
But no. The Keller tradition lives on in even the most recent generations. I find myself on the defense when I travel home for holidays, feeling inadequate without a ‘plus one’ to bring to the holiday festivities. My cousins’ girlfriends have become a staple at the family dinner table. They’re lovely girls, really, and they blend in well sitting next to my grandmothers—talking over cranberry sauce about modern family life and generally having it all. They nibble conservatively as they discuss their life goals, which include, but are not limited to, curing leukemia with their biochemistry degree while simultaneously providing my cousin with a large and loving family. They’re swirling cookies in their herbal tea with one hand as they’re surviving the family name with the other.
I’m in awe of them. It takes a confident woman to fill shoes that big. I can barely form a sentence together to explain to my aunts and uncles that the lovely necklace I’m wearing wasn’t a gift from someone special—I bought it for myself at Claire’s.
But if there’s anything that three and a half years of college has taught me it’s this: never let a pushy old lady tell you when and when not to be married or pregnant (even if she’s the source of your life-blood) and always have a decoy in times of distress. Recent years have shown me that these wonderful women do more than provide love and comfort to my cousins and my family’s peace-of-mind, the girlfriends provide a buffer.
I am no longer plagued with the uncomfortable confrontations that, apparently, occur with the older generations of my family. They field questions about table manners and quantum physics while I help myself to seconds on apple pie. They are perfect candidates for my replacement. I’ll gladly take the romantic hit while they’re worrying about public schooling systems in whatever county they get their first crappy office job. I’ll be in the condo next to them, ready to baby-sit. Because that’s what family is for.
And the system seems to have worked so far. With the help of higher education and a keen sense of avoidance, I feel like the Keller tradition is safe with them. I haven’t had an uncomfortable confrontation with my Nana in a few years, although I do see her from time to time making a pass at my belly. Although there may not be a way to get her off my back for good, at least she knows far less about my sex life than she used to. And that is something we can all be thankful for.
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