The stories we tell

I recently spoke with a very dear friend who I have known a very long time on a one and a half hour skype call. We spent a lot of time talking about family and discussing our past. She told me some things about her parents I hadn’t heard before and I told some of the stories from my family. And this got me thinking about the stories that are passed down from our parents and grandparents. The way we tell them. The way we tell them as if they were true. I told her that the story as she heard it from her father might not have been the way it really happened. And she answered me by saying that that was the way it happened – her father wasn’t a liar, he told her the truth. I told her that I wasn’t calling him a liar but that his story of what happened in his life was just the way he remembered it. But it didn’t mean that that was actually what happened. He wasn’t a liar – he was human. Like the story from my grandfather about the boat he took in his travel from Poland to the USA in the early 20th century. When my cousin researched his history, she couldn’t find him on that boat. But another boat was in New York Harbor at exactly the same time and on that boat’s list was his name. He had seen that other boat when he arrived in America and instead of remembering the name of the boat he was on, he remembered the name on the side of the ship he saw when entering the harbor to his new world. He wasn’t a liar – he was human.

Humans tell stories. Well some of us do. Not all. Some are just silent, unable to make sense of the life they are living, unable to recreate it in words, unable to examine what their life is. But I think most of us humans tell stories. We have a need to explain and understand ourselves. Did a person not choose to go down a path in their lives because they felt it was better to stay at home or was it because they were afraid. Did a person become successful because their own father encouraged and supported their choices or were they just lucky? Did someone not follow their dream because they just didn’t want it bad enough or because they weren’t strong enough to buck a domineering mother?

Life is never a straight shining path. It is a crooked, winding, bumpy road with all kinds of divergent paths leading off to different directions. What fork you choose to take at any of those branches determines the path of your life – you rarely get a chance to backtrack and redo your choice. You can only move forward. But your mind can redo those turns you took.  You can think back and tell yourself “I took that path because your father was there and I chose to marry him”. But years later, well along on the chosen path, deep down, you know that the reason you didn’t follow the path of your dream was because you weren’t brave enough to do so, and so, you took the easier path.  And yes in many cases, having encouraging parents or advisors who can help you decide what is the best choice for you to follow is definitely an asset. Many of those forks in the road get walked without any forthought whatsoever. We humans just go where our feet lead us and then spend decades mulling it over and telling the story which we, with our human memories, remember about it. And that is the life story that our children or our friends get to hear and to pass on to others.

I think I must have been born a sceptic (or at least someone who was unwilling to accept at face value what others told them). Maybe not since birth but definitely since I was four years old. I was four years old when I needed to have my tonsils removed. The very nice doctor told me it wouldn’t hurt and afterwards, I could eat all the ice cream I wanted. When I woke up my throat hurt a lot and when I tried to eat the ice cream my mother gave me, it hurt even more. That very nice doctor lied to me!! And I don’t think I ever believed anyone else, or the stories they tell, wholeheartedly, ever since.

I know people who never fail to say how much they loved their parents or how much they respected them, or admired them, or looked up to them or miss them greatly once gone. And I have to admit, this makes me feel a bit jealous. Because I am unable to use any of those words to describe how I feel about my own parents. Now don’t get me wrong…my parents were not not horrible people. They didn’t beat me, they didn’t starve or torture me. They did the best they could with the limited means they had that were a result of poor decision-making earlier in their lives. I definitely loved them but… By the time I was 14 or 15 I was sure I wanted to live my life and make choices completely differently than what my mother did. And I give my mother credit for encouraging me to do exactly that.