I am musing on the power of our personal stories as my many children ask often to hear about my own childhood, their grandmothers' and grandfathers' lives, how Mama and Daddy fell in love...
We use stories to shape our world, define who we are and where we come from, strengthen family and community bonds. The stories of our faith lift us and become beacons of possibility. The stories of our inevitable foibles, attempts at restitution, repentance and forgiveness keep us humble. Sometimes they may keep us from making the same mistake.
My own mother was master story teller. My childhood is filled with the stories of my parents and extended family reaching back for generations. I now tell my children these same stories of adventure, courage, cowardice, love, family, loss, perserverance and joy as I snuggle my children. When I was a child and my mother was parenting my very active brothers and I, she never said "Because I said so." Instead, she answered, "Its on page 438 or paragraph two on page 18 of The Mother's Manuel." My brothers often searched the house for this Mother's Manuel. My mother would smile and tell them they would never see it. She was saving it for me, her only daughter, as a gift on the day my first child was born.
My first child was born, prematurely and being life-flighted to another hospital and mother gave me the Manuel. She started out by saying, "Kornelia wanted her baby girl so much. She had the perfect name picked out, Justina..." It was a story I had heard for years and only now could begin to understand. When the story of Justina finished she continued, "Momo was pregnant and there was a fire. Little Sarah was running next to the burn pile and the ties of her apron caught. Momo ran and rolled Sarah under her. She burned her hands and face and saved Sarah but Aunt Ruth was born to early that night. They put Aunt Ruth in the bread box at the back of the wood stove, where the bread was set to rise..." Never mind that all the players in these stories were long dead.
My mother had been giving me the Mother's Manuel for years. To my brothers as well, though I suspect that my father told them stories I will never understand. Now I find myself drawing on the stories of women and men, great and less great as I strive to bring up another generation. My ancestors are with me and always were. Their stories have not died. I too will be remembered. Maybe even hundreds of years later as are some of my ancestors. All because a mother and father tell stories, over and over--stories that give place, understanding and stability in a world that likes to think itself always in the process of recreating itself.
