I was lucky in many ways that my parents were young when I was born. My mother was 19, my father 22.

Their youth meant their parents were also relatively young, as were their parents’ parents, which dropped me into a multitude of grandparents and great-grandparents at birth, a tribe of elders whose physical presence would enrich my life for many years to come.

These were not nurturing John and Olivia Walton types, mind you. These were toughened life warriors, some of whom braved to cross the ocean for a better life, all of whom lived through world wars, the Great Depression and an era when children were seen and not heard.

I don’t recall getting hugs from them, nor much intimacy at all.

What I do recall getting from them is identity.

I know who I am because of time spent in the kitchen of my great-grandmother on my mother’s side.

Big Mama, we called her, and she came to South Carolina from Lebanon at 15 with a thick accent and a singular instinct for making Mediterranean food before Americans knew what an olive was.

While her husband built a grocery empire, Big Mama spent her days preparing grape leaves, tabbouleh and kibbeh for her family and extended family in her oversized kitchen where she had two stoves, two refrigerators and a walk-in pantry from which wafted the scents of her country’s aromatic spices.

Because of Big Mama, I know firsthand why I love to cook, especially ethnic foods, and why a whiff of cumin feels like home. I know, too, about faith. Big Mama never failed to attend Catholic Mass every morning.

My other great-grandmother, Granny, also on my mother’s side, couldn’t have been more different. And yet she was the same.

Like Big Mama, Granny cooked the food of her people, in her case, the people of the South Carolina mill town where she worked and lived. You could not be in Granny’s house for long before she would roll out a batch of buttermilk biscuits to go with a bowl of okra and tomato soup she canned from her garden.

Unlike Big Mama who wore dresses of Lebanese silk, whose sprawling brick house was resplendent in rich mahogany furniture and taffeta drapes, Granny wore a bun on the back of her head and a bonnet. She dipped snuff and lived in a small, wood-frame house with feather mattresses and an outhouse. Granny carried the blood of the Cherokee Indian in her veins, which informed my passion for Native American spirituality and the sacredness of all.

Here in Ohio now where we moved 27 years ago, I claim my Southernness most distinctly from Granny, and also my parent’s parents, who hailed from Mississippi and South Carolina and sported the drawls and the Southern Methodism to prove it.

I claim from all of them not only a sense of belonging, but an unmitigated will to survive the hardships of their lives and times.

These people from whom I am descended are no longer. My last great-grandparent died when I was 25, my remaining grandparent 10 years later. My parents are gone now, too, my father from colon cancer at 57, my mother from a household accident when she was 68.

I miss their physical presence for myself.

I miss it too, for my children, who never got to experience firsthand the rich cultures and the elder ancestors whose very being tells them who they are.

In a fragmented world where a sense of belonging becomes a monumental challenge, I believe it becomes ever more important to connect to identity and primal power, which is why I used to take my children south when I could for family vacations.

I know in the deep wellspring of my mother’s soul that knowledge of who my they are and how they got here is critical for my children’s well-being.

And so I maintain relationships with my three sisters and my cousins. I bring out my mother’s dishes on special occasions and explain to my children, probably ad nauseum, how they were used in past lives. I make and teach the recipes of our mutual ancestors and explain their history as best I can.

It can’t be the same, of course. There can be no replacing the feelings I felt sitting in Big Mama’s kitchen as she rolled the grape leaves, as she spoke to my mother and my grandmother in the thick accent of the Old Country.

Simply being in the presence of Big Mama’s strength gave me so much of mine.

And now all that my children know of this they know from me.

Which can feel like a colossal responsibility at times.

Which, regardless, has to be enough to carry the power and the stories forward.

Which, with the breath of the ancestors behind us, will be.

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