Gabriela: my family backstory

Me in front of a Christmas tree, Czechia, circa 1995

As a third culture kid, I got comfortable with always being the 'exotic' one at various stages of my life. Like I'm supposed to represent to the questioner an archetype of my 'real culture' which is frankly transient. I learned how to be a cultural chameleon and be comfortable in various settings. As I grew older, I realized that being an expat is where I feel most comfortable. And that's perhaps how I ended up living in Stockholm.

I was born in 1990 to a Kazakh mother who had moved out of a tiny rural village and studied in St. Petersburg, in the Soviet Union, where she met my Czech father at university. As a family anecdote, she was apparently trying to cut in line for lunch, and my father, seeing her magnetic charm, let her go ahead of her, and the rest is history.

Until recently, I wasn't aware of the rest of my father's ancestry, and I didn't start reading my grandmother's diary until she had passed away in 2020. I remember her mentioning several times that she had a hard childhood after the war, but little did I know there was so much more to learn about her and her life story.

After an accident, she was transferred to an elderly center in Moravia, Czechia. And due to the distance from Prague, I wasn't able to visit her as often as I would have liked. I encouraged her to keep a diary of her life so she would have something to pass the time. Because she mentioned there isn't much to do in an elderly home.

As is sometimes the case in life, I always thought we would have more time to go through the diary. I often heard her proudly say she was working on family chronicles, which was exciting, and somehow, every time I visited her, we did not end up talking about it, to my later regret.

On my maternal side, my family had survived harsh conditions by the Soviet Union and the very little talked about topics of the famine, where perhaps as much as 60 percent, 1-2 million of Kazakhs died. My family had navigated the loss of their male family members due to them being drafted to war, the forced sedentisation, which completely disintegrated a nomadic way of life, and destroyed family ties and ancestral culture.

As I learn more about my past and the hardships my ancestors endured, I better understand them and how family patterns are passed down. I have found an interesting framework called Family constellation therapy, an experiential, group-based approach that uncovers unconscious generational family patterns, traumas, or unhealthy dynamics that cause present-day issues. I have read a lot about it, and it suddenly means so much to me personally. It makes me see my family as children who have received certain cultural/family patterns, and they/we/me have an incredibly hard time, if even possible, to separate ourselves from the lineage and traumas that have passed through. The difference is that our ancestors had no means to access therapy; mine certainly didn't.

I haven't tried Family constellation therapy yet, but I'm looking into it in the future. So far, I'm beyond grateful I have my therapist with whom I work to uncover unconscious patterns and help me integrate some of the difficult stories and help me find softer relations to some of the more complex family members. Little did I know that starting the Ancestry Vision project would also lead to personal growth and family healing.