So my pre-marital counselling classes started today – one part of me sees it as a necessary task to do before the wedding, just another thing to check off on the list to make sure that the wedding goes well. That part of me is ambivalent, as it’s sure that it will be informative, but will require an investment of time – a commodity that’s increasingly difficult to come across these days. The other part of me is a little worried, to be honest. The counselling comes with its share of homework, and today’s was one that had me confronting something that I’m neither happy about nor comfortable with:

I DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT MY FAMILY HISTORY. 

Maybe it’s just part of Jamaican culture (I’m definitely not the person to speak on this authoritatively), but there’s not a lot shared about my history. I know bits and pieces, and if I ever really sat down and took a look at things, I’m sure I’d be able to accurately piece things together, but that’s just not the way it is right now. One of the things we needed to do for the first class was construct a genogram so we could better analyze our histories and what experiences and behaviours might be passed down through the generations. Yeah – I’ve tried my hand at making family trees before, but to realize that you really don’t know that much at all about a good number of family members? Eye-opening.