My Family Tree

Passed down from generations too far back to trace,
I can see all my relations when I look into my face,
May never make it famous but I'll never bring it shame,
It's my last name

~My Last Name, Dierks Bentley


I have deep roots. Parts of my family have been in and around the area where I grew up, North Texas, since the turn of the 1900, some longer than that. It is very easy for me to get in my car, and drive for hours, picking out the places where I have spent time, where my family grew up where we have lived and loved and raised babies and laughed and cried, where we spent time.

While wandering the streets of the storied Fort Worth Stockyards, I realized something, or rather, a thought that has been lurking in the back of my mind, something I have struggled with for well over a year now, came to me. I can not soak Layla in Texas, I can not let her grow wild like the flowers, teach her to ride horses, listen her to acquire that accent that creeps up when I'm annoyed. The dust of Texas will not soak into her blood, she won't have the steel spine of a southern belle who has no fears to speak her mind.

The Army is changing how I will parent, how my little girl will grow up, how any children I may be blessed with after her will grow up. My heart aches that she will not see the blistering heat of a Texas July, the glory of the bluebonnets in spring, the insanity that is walking around in shorts on Christmas Day. She will not see how the dust of West Texas sets the sun on fire in the evening. She will not know that the color of her eyes is the morning sky from my Dad's back porch.

Like everything else in life, my feelings on home, and what homes means to me, changed when Layla was born. Home is no longer a place to run from, to gain my freedom from, but it is the place to come to when I am tired, when the world has grown to be too much, and more importantly, it is the place I bring my child to. Right now, as she flips through a book on the couch besides me, I realize that I am her only link to the family she has, the vast family that lives under the bluest skies in the world, the ones back home. It is one thing for me to be separated from my family, although I deal with occasional bouts of homesickness, there is a freedom in being on my own, but it is an entirely different thing to raise my child separated from the roots I have, and the family I have.

All roads lead back home, ultimately, for me, and always have. Now I will have to teach Layla the same thing, and hope she realizes how special the roots she has as well are.

~Jennifer

Layla's First Christmas, spent in Texas, in the arms of my family.