My Family Legacy

My customs, family legacy comes from my mother's side, more than anything else, since I did not relate to my father's family since I was a child, being orphan of father and practically of mother, since I stopped seeing her since I was a child, being in charge of a lady friend of his father, then from this side I did not have any type of family reference, only from my father.

That is why all my values, customs and upbringing come from my mother's side, especially from my grandmother. Since I was little I have loved to hear family stories, anecdotes, so for this reason, I know more or less who my great grandparents were and their way of life; my grandfather, a big black man with a goajira of pure stock, were my grandmother's parents, from whom she inherited her father's dark color and her mother's straight black hair.

My grandmother told me that from a very young age she was taught to do housework, cook, wash by hand, clean and even cook with firewood, because at that time and for those haciendas that was the custom, so from a very young age she was already a young housewife. She had many family incidents, her mother died and her father soon married again, starting her to live an ordeal, from there, tired of this family situation, she married the boyfriend she had and the children came, soon after, that man abandoned her and her children, then she began to work to support her children.

With her best gift, that of being a very good cook, she raised her children and became the matriarch of the family. The first thing she taught her children was good cooking and as most of them were females, only one male, they all adopted my grandmother's way of cooking and her customs, celebrating the holidays with the typical meals of those dates like December with hallacas, baked pork leg, chicken salad and its corresponding sweets.

During the Semana Mayor, there was a great variety of ways to prepare fish, coconut sweets, majarete and above all in the process teaching the younger members of the family, so that everyone would continue to maintain the customs in the family, as it is today. My best memories come from my grandmother's and my mother's cooking. Today my husband and I are trying to maintain these traditions as a family, teaching our children and sharing them all in the process, creating memories in them as well.

In our family it is customary for young children to ask their older cousins for a blessing and we instill in them that these are their uncles, even if they are not, there is a respect for the elders. This for people outside the family causes confusion hahaha because they do not know who is who, it is very funny but all of us at home keep that between us and only explain to those who are close to us. That custom among other things, are what distinguish us as a family and we have been cultivating among our children.

Both men and women have brought as a legacy the skills in the kitchen and in sewing, which was also one of the trades of my grandmother, because having several children, many times she was in the need to make her clothes and some of her daughters also learned the trade of sewing, among them my mother. Today I have several cousins, men and women, who make a living in the kitchen, one of them is a chef and now lives in Spain and he always says that he is who he is, because of the teaching of his grandmother my aunt, because of her love for work, perseverance, to earn a living with honesty, that came from home, from our early childhood.

Those are values that each of us have had through our mothers, who were raised under those same values and because of that we have achieved many goals and life purposes, thanks to the fact that we were taught to be independent, hardworking and without fear of success, since we were little, I do not say it has been easy, But it has been part of our DNA, it is in us, it is part of who we are and in the same way we raise our children to be productive, respectful, cheerful, active people and not to forget where they come from, which was from a humble house in a small town, but full of love and work, from where our legacy was born.

This is my participation in Creative Nonfiction in The Ink Well: Prompt #13 I invite my friends @evev, @annafenix and @chacald.dcymt to participate.