I
remember asking my parents to tell us stories when my brothers and I were kids.
We heard the sad account of when my father had scarlet fever and his teddy bear
had to be burned. We know about the day he was lost in the neighborhood park of
the city where he grew up, and that when he finally returned home, his mother
didn’t know whether to hug her little boy or spank him, so overwhelming were
both her relief at having him home and her angst over his wandering away.
We’ve
heard my mother’s memories of being allowed to watch the Mickey Mouse Show if
she finished her homework on time. She has told us of endless afternoons
wandering the woods around home with her English setter, Lucky, and that she
once fell from a tree and landed flat on her back, momentarily knocking the air
from her lungs and frightening her own mother into thinking she was dead.
As
a kid, I could scarcely picture my parents as children, climbing trees and
wandering unfamiliar parks. It wasn’t until I was in college, making the long
drive home one Thanksgiving weekend with my dad that I finally had the epiphany
– as he was telling me a story from his past – that my parents were people long
before I came into the world, with separate lives filled with stories all their
own. But I still loved hearing those stories as a little girl, even if the
characters within were mostly imagined to me.
It
is the same for my children, as they beseech us to tell our childhood tales.
Probably there is magic in knowing Mama and Papa used to be kids who fell down
and got into trouble, played with and fought with their siblings, built forts
in the woods, and were sometimes sent to their rooms.
Sharing
stories is also a way for our kids to get to know other members of our family. Our
children know that one uncle, sent to his room as a boy, lit a model rocket
from an electrical outlet, sending it zooming across the hallway where it landed
on a bed and nearly sparked a fire. They’ve heard about a family hiking trip
when another uncle, then only 5 years old or so, started the trek with only a
teddy bear in his backpack and ended it with a pack heavy with dozens of interesting
rocks he’d collected along the way. (The former is just plain funny. The latter
has been shared on the many occasions our children fill their pockets with
seemingly arbitrary rocks.)
The
kids already have their own stories to tell. Usually these begin, “Mama,
remember when…?” As in, “Remember when the bears were in our sandbox?” The
bears visited our sandbox when the children were too small to actually
remember, but it’s one of the stories we tell, and so it has become a part of
our family’s collective memory.
We
pass many things onto our children, both intentionally and inadvertently –
physical traits and bits of our own personalities, our likes and dislikes, our
family traditions. They learn from watching us, from living with us for the
first however many years of their lives, and from the stories we tell – and the
ones we are creating together. For along with telling stories, we are all the
while players in our children’s own life narratives, participating in the tales
they will someday tell.
Which
memories will stand out in their future minds, I don’t know. I hope with the
stories they make their own, my children’s chronicles will include some family
history – silly stories like their great-grandfather preferring to eat his cake
covered in gravy, or hopeful ones like their great-great-grandmother arriving
in the U.S. from Sweden as a teenager whose only English words were “please”
and “thank you.”
Most
of all, I hope my kids will have a wealth of entertaining and enlightening
material to share someday, years from now, when their own children beg, “Tell
us a story from when you were little.”
