The Many Layers of Family Story Telling

The telling of stories, especially the telling of family stories to family members as well as to friends and even to strangers is a complex multi-layered experience. As such it strikes me as a thoroughly sacred act. It is a ritual movement, a dance of some kind, in which we continuously determine our coordinates within the context of our family, circle of friends and the world at large. The act of story telling is deeply embedded in who we are as human beings. Stories provide a compass for us in a way few other things do. Stories fill the place of instincts (of which we have some, but only in remnant form). Animals don't need stories. We do. 

But stories do more than just substitute as instincts. Instincts are firm, unshakable behavioral patterns. They don't change much, even over the course of a few hundred years. Stories do change. Every telling renders them differently, every time someone else tells the "same" story, it actually is not the same. New meaning, new growth shows itself with every instance of telling a story.

Stories invite us to see the world flexibly. They welcome us into a context of meaning that never stops changing. And yet, stories--and family stories especially--extend our roots deeply into the past. They secure us, balance us, settled us. From there we experience a kind of nurturing that does not compare or hold up to any piece of information we may receive through twitter, Facebook, the news, etc. 

As a child I loved listening to the stories my mother and father and other relatives told me--about the war, about their childhoods, stories of fear, joy, loss, pain and searching. These were stories about their friends, their parents, their siblings. And I soaked them up. Imagining my parents and grandparents as little children, just like myself, was both incredibly pleasurable and incredibly mysterious: Could it really have been true? 

As a father I tell family stories, stories about aunts, uncles, grandparents, mother, father, cousins, because I want to let my children experience where they belong, I want to renew my own sense of belonging and I want to let those about whom I am writing know that they also belong. I grew up with the stories I was told by my mother, father, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles. I loved hearing them! Imagining the places they referenced as they may have looked long before my time. Recognizing similarities and differences . . .

As I tell stories I am confronted with a strange paradox: these are my stories and, yet, they are also about others. To the extent that it is I who is telling these stories, the characters in them are mine; they are part of my imagination. However, the sentence "Any likeness or similarity with living persons is purely accidental"--that sentence is not true for my stories. The likenesses are intentional. I am writing about people I know. 

For some reading these stories may feel awkward, like looking into the private sphere of another person, family, couple. And, yes, you are looking into that sphere. And what I'm writing about often is private. Private but not secret. In a community, a world community, where individuals and groups are becoming increasingly isolated from each other, privacy becomes an additional wall hindering us in really getting to know each other. In order to understand each other we need to take the risk of being vulnerable with each other. When I write about my family I make myself vulnerable. And, yes, I make them vulnerable too. But more than anything I present them as human beings as real as possible. But never without a keen eye for each of their individual human nobleness. 

I am writing these stories because my family makes me think and reflect. It is a hermeneutic for me, a lens through which I understand life. As such the lives and experiences of every single one of my family members informs my thinking. Writing stories about my family is like looking at my family tree, beholding and admiring its growth, its quirky forms, its blossoms and roots, but also it's deadened branches, leafless areas and weak spots. 

As a father I wish to help my sons see how their freedom to be who they want to be is intimately tied to how they're connected to their family, paternal and maternal. This is a strange concept. Many would disagree and only see the contradiction between being free and being tied to something. I don't believe in that contradiction. Really, I believe we're most unfree and still paralyzingly tethered to our families precisely when we don't (know to) tell family stories. Not knowing family stories is a form of primal impoverishment.

As parents we have to accept that our children will tell stories about us. It is their right and certainly chance to frame family experiences precisely from their perspective, without permission. While that may sound extreme and radical we may also consider this: Telling stories is healing. It's a healing that is not only about conflict. It is also about healing separation, distance, death. Healing never means "making it go away." Rather it means integration. It's a binding together of many elements. When I tell stories about my family I am also binding us together, bringing together the family members who are separated by thousands of miles and a large ocean. I don't know that they read every blog I write, but often they do. Next to telephone, e-mail, FaceTime, Skype, texting and other ways of communicating with each other these stories also are a kind of communication: I'm thinking about you, you're on my mind. Writing stories about my family is making them present to myself and my children and others. It's about my longing for them and it is about expressing that longing, fearlessly.