Family Fun

I apparently have done a poor job of telling people about my family. Last week I realized that I had somehow neglected to tell a good friend some of the most basic things about my sisters. I was kind of ashamed of myself for that and since I just came home from a family reunion, I think it would be appropriate for me to dedicate a post to explaining a bit about my folks.

My family has been in the American South since long before the American Revolution. We have been in the Tennessee for many generations, which is one of the reasons why I have a fierce allegiance to my home state. My great-great-grandfather, Isaac Newton Roland, and my great-grandfather, Clifford Paul Roland (pictured), helped to establish Freed-Hardeman University, a small Church of Christ school in Henderson, Tennessee. One of the amazing things about the small world that is the Church of Christ is that I sometimes run into people who studied under great-granddaddy. By all accounts he was a very pleasant and very Godly man, and it makes me happy to hear him remembered fondly. He died when I was seven years old, so I don't remember much about him from personal experience, but one of my dad's prized photos is one taken shortly before great-granddady's death, with the four generations of Roland men from great-granddaddy down to me. I am told that C.P. and I have many similarities (including Masters degrees from Vanderbilt's Divinity School!), and I can only hope to live up to his example.

My grandfather, Hall Roland, was C.P.'s second son. He married my grandmother, Juanita June Clifton, got a Masters in Bible at Abilene Christian University (then just a College), then went on and got a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering. He taught briefly at Vanderbilt University, then took a job at the University of Tennessee, where he served for more than thirty years as a professor of Nuclear Engineering.

I love the story of how Grandmom and Granddad got together. Granddaddy was home from the Navy, and he'd decided he wanted to double-date with his little brother, Ike. So, in a time-honored tradition, they pulled out the high school yearbook and started looking for the prettiest girls in the area. Sure enough, Granddaddy saw the picture of Grandmom. He recognized her a little bit because he had been a referee at one or two of her high school basketball games, and he decided that she was the one he wanted to call. Grandmom, who lived in a small city in West Tennessee not far from Henderson, had for some time been seeing a boy from Memphis. Well he had started to get serious about the direction of their relationship, but Grandmom was getting tired of him. She intended to go off to Ole Miss for college and didn't want to be tied down. So on that fateful day she had just called the Memphis boy and told him that she didn't think she'd be seeing him any more. When Granddad got her on the phone, she didn't feel like going out with him, but she didn't really have anything better to do either. She agreed to go. By the end of the night, she didn't know for certain that she wanted to marry him, but she sure knew that she'd like to marry someone like him. Her time at Ole Miss was short-lived - they got married not long afterward.

My dad, Edward Roland, was Grandmom and Granddad's first child. He grew up in the '50s and '60s, while Granddad was finishing school and getting started in academia. Once he got to college, he failed to take it seriously and he essentially flunked out. But not before he'd met my mom, Martha Faye Clifton (not a close relation to Grandmom) on a blind date! They got married in 1969 - my mom was 19, my dad was 18. Pretty quickly after they got married, Papa realized that Vietnam was in his future. Knowing that he'd have more control over his destiny if he signed up than if he was drafted, he enlisted as a medic. My second-oldest sister (more on this in a bit) was born shortly before he had to ship out for the war - he spent his first Christmas as a father in Bien Hoa. Once he got back from Vietnam, Papa spent a long time selling insurance - a job that he hated. Mama, meanwhile, stayed at home with all of us young'uns, occasionally accepting jobs making wedding dresses. But one fateful day in 1989 a tornado hit Huntsville, Alabama, the city where we lived, and my dad was called on to use his medical skills again. That experience, along with some prodding from my mom, led him to go back to school to become a nurse. For the last few years he's been working as a nurse practitioner, and he's been more happy with his career than he ever was when I was growing up.

Now, I have to explain the sister situation. I have four of them, but this sometimes gets confusing. Bethany, the one mentioned above, was my parents' firstborn child. I do have an older sister, however, because Lauri, who is a couple of years older than Bethany, was actually born to one of my uncles but came to live with us when she was a pre-teen. I may be a little bit of a slow learner because, despite the fact that Lauri's biological parentage was an open topic of conversation, I was about ten years old before it occurred to me that she was anything other than just a regular sister. After Bethany was born, the doctors told my mom that she couldn't have any more kids. In light of this turn of events, my parents adopted my third sister, Rebekah, from Korea. Shortly thereafter, they found out that I was on the way. So in a pretty short time, my family went from one kid to four. Two years after my own birth, another sister, Miriam Grace, was born. Sadly, she was born with massive health issues and she only survived about 24 hours. It was an extraordinary blessing, then, when a few years later my mom found out she was pregnant with my little sister, Anna Caroline.

Nowadays, Lauri is married and living in Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband, Dwayne, and my two-year-old niece, Meredith. She also has a fifteen-year-old son, Joshua, who lives with his father (her first husband, Will) just outside of Huntsville. Bethany teaches middle school music and lives with her husband, Scott, and my five-year-old nephew, Elijah, in Winchester, Tennessee. Bethany is expecting a baby boy in November. Rebekah, a registered nurse, is currently a stay-at-home mom living in Troy, Illinois, with her husband, Jason, and taking care of my three-year-old niece, Ruth, and my brand new (as of March) niece, Lydia. Anna Caroline lives with her husband, Len, in Huntsville, and they are expecting their first child - a daughter! - also in November. Yes, you read correctly... there will be three babies celebrating their first Christmas in our family this year!

That's an awful lot of information, so I'll leave it at that. Sorry if this is kind of scattershot or ill-thought-through, but I mostly just wanted to get it all written down.