My thoughts were drawn to my grandmother the other day. I never knew her very well beyond the self-interested childhood sphere of age eight, when she died quite unexpectedly just after her 50th anniversary. But there was one fact I could grip with stark clarity: she was the wife of a missionary. She married my grandfather fairly young and traveled with him extensively, going so far as to raise her own children in another country thousands of miles away from her friends (and possibly any family, not that I understood her to have any happy connections). It was baffling to me for many years. I was a progressive liberal and a budding feminist with a strong streak of individualism. What could possibly motivate a woman to up, marry, travel hell-knows-where at the whim of a man who is now practically the epitome of far-right religious Midwest values, and then have three children? And how could this person possibly be related to me? It seemed impossible that we shared the same genes.

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