Tell Your Tough Family Stories

Flanna, age 2

I was talking to my daughter recently about her earliest memory.  She says she can remember me singing while I stood holding her in the shower in our green tiled bathroom with the bamboo shower curtain in our old home on Pulaski Street in Athens, GA.  She would've been about 2 at that time.  I do remember that moment, because it was unusual for me to hold her in the shower.  I usually gave her a bath, and even if I had given her a shower, I would usually just hold her hand and let her stand in the shower because I was too nervous I would drop her if I was holding her.  But on that morning, she had been sick, and I wanted to hold her up high so she could breathe in more steam from the shower.   I remember being nervous and holding her slippery soapy body so tightly, so she couldn't wiggle out of my arms.  But she just remembers a sweet warm care-taking experience, thank goodness, not my fear of her slipping!

Anyway, she asked why she doesn't remember anything from before this memory.  There were probably zillions of things that happened before that day that were just as interesting, if not more interesting than that first memory.  And I told her that one of my professors had taught me that we often do have sensory memories from before our "first memory," but that until we can understand and tell stories, we aren't able to encode those memories so that we can later recall them.  It was probably around 2 or 2 1/2 when she was first able to understand and tell simple stories, and that's probably why she remembers and can recall this moment.  

I think a lot about how stories are so important to us as humans.  Stories help us make sense of who we are, of who our family is and was, of how we got to this place and where we might go.  Stories are more than just looking back and reminiscing, they are actually important in how we see ourselves as connected to the world and what we think of ourselves individually.  Carol Westby, a brilliant SLP and researcher,  remarked in a recent journal article about the importance of teaching children to create stories about their own lives, "A coherent life story can lead to making informed choices, learning to effectively solve problems, and taking control of and responsibility for one’s life." Also, as I've discussed before in this blog, researchers at Emory University's Family Narratives lab say, "... adolescents who are embedded in a storied family history show higher levels of emotional well-being, perhaps because these stories provide larger narrative frameworks for understanding self and the world, and because these stories help provide a sense of continuity across generations in ways that promote a secure identity (see Fivush, Bohanek, & Duke, 2008, for a full theoretical discussion)."  When we can tell a story about how we overcame an obstacle, or how our family members faced strife but persevered, we help our children become more reflective individuals who can calmly face problems, flip back through their library of their own or others' experiences, and come up with solutions that might work in this case.

So, don't sugar coat your family history.  Tell your children the good family memories, but also the hard ones.  For Flanna, some of those include:  How her great great grandma died young, but the older children took care of the younger children as well as they could for as long as they could.  How the younger ones had to be sent to an orphanage, but they kept in touch and always sent letters back and forth.  How her grandparents worked hard physical jobs that were tough on their bodies in order to earn enough money to send their children to college, and their children were the first to graduate college on either side of the family.  How her great grandpa had a car wreck that caused a spinal cord injury but worked hard to relearn things with therapy and really enjoyed the therapy dogs that would visit the rehab center. How her great aunt wanted to have children for so many years and didn't give up and finally became a mom for the first time in her 40s.  How her grandmother had to move from one state to another the summer before her senior year of high school, and how that felt like the end of the world, but actually allowed her to meet her future husband.  How her great grandpa realized as an older man that he was actually homosexual, and how hard that was for the family, but also how it was probably such a relief for him not to feel like he was hiding his true self anymore.  How her great grandmother grew up in poverty but became a Women's Army Corps member and learned skills and got a great job as a switchboard operator and was able to provide for herself even after her divorce.

Giving our children the good stories along with the bad can steel them for the tough times in their own lives.  From our family stories, Flannery could learn:  that families take care of one another, that families work hard to stay connected, that our family values education, that it runs in her family to love animals, that children are a gift not a burden, that sometimes scary changes work out well in the end, that you need to listen to your heart and be true to yourself about who you are from the beginning, that it's smart to work hard and be independent and always be able to provide for yourself. It's hard and scary to talk about difficult things with our children, and we definitely need to wait until they are old enough to understand the concepts, but it's important to be bold enough to tell our tough family stories as well as the good memories.


What family stories do you think have shaped who you are as a person? What stories do you want to be sure to pass down to your children or your children's children?

References:

Fivush, R., Bohanek, J. G., & Zaman, W. (2010). Personal and intergenerational narrativesin relation to adolescents’ well-being. In T. Habermas (Ed.), The development of autobiographicalreasoning in adolescence and beyond. New Directions for Child and AdolescentDevelopment, 131, 45–57.

Westby, C. & Culatta, B. (2016, Oct.). Telling tales:  Personal event narratives and life stories. Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, Vol. 47, pp. 260-282.

Create a Family Narrative

I just love reading books about marriage and children. I love self-help books in general, as well, but books about marriage and family relationships specifically are like chocolate to me...addicting and fun! Right now, I'm reading "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work" by John Gottman and Nan Silver, and it's been really good so far.

One of the points they touch on as being important to maintaining a good marriage is the idea of creating a "history of your relationship." It seems that looking back together, and creating a story of your life together that focuses on the "good stuff" helps to buffer your marriage in times of crisis. Gottman says,

"I've found 94 percent of the time that couples who put a positive spin on their marriage's history are likely to have a happy future as well."

And it's not just that happy memories bring happiness to our marriage, either. Gottman further describes these histories we create about our marriage like this:

"...each couple and each family create its own microculture. And like other cultures, these small units have their customs, rituals, and myths--the stories the couple tell themselves that explain their sense of what their marriage is like, what it means to be a part of their group."

Our family stories are a large part of what help us identify ourselves as a "we," as in this life together, as a team. Family stories aren't just memories; they're how we view ourselves. This really got me thinking about the narratives I already know about my extended family.

For instance, my maternal grandmother Norma's mom was very ill and then passed away very young, and my grandmother tried to take care of the youngest children, but they eventually had to go to orphanages. Even so, my grandma Norma kept in touch with all of them and maintained the family connection throughout their lives. I wonder if this inspired my sister to be a foster mother in some way. Or if this part of our family's history somehow set the stage for our whole family to be so open to the beauty and wonder of adoption. Or if perhaps this story made family connection all the more important to my family.

And then there's the story of my birth. I was born 2 months premature, and was only 2 pounds 13 ounces when I was born. I had a feeding tube, and surgery to remove my appendix at a few days old, and things were very bleak and scary for my parents, I'm sure. But I grew, and thrived, and my mom pumped breastmilk for me all the while, which I believe really made a wonderful difference for me. Hearing that story about myself made me think that I was one strong kiddo. That I had really overcome something big. And I think it really affected me when I had my daughter, to want to nurse her, as well.

And on Robi's side of the family, his maternal grandfather Bobby was born early, as well, and Bobby's mother died in childbirth. His aunts took turns caring for him, but he really had no stable sense of family life growing up. Perhaps that's what made him such a good father, husband, and grandfather--that he wanted for his children what he never got to have: a stable, loving home.

And in my own family growing up, one of the important parts of our family narrative was that my dad's dad was in the military, and my dad attended 13 different schools growing up. So, when he had children, he and my mom made a point to stay in one town throughout all of our school years. That's right, my sister and I went to school in the same county from preschool until we graduated from high school. And that really made us feel a sense of home, connection and stability. We definitely felt that we belonged somewhere. My parents also highly valued education, and didn't want my sister or me to have to work hard physical jobs like they did. They told us over and over that school was our top priority, and that only through education could we have the good careers we wanted. My sister and I were the first people on either side of our family to get a college degree, and both of us went on to get higher degrees as well.

As for my own little family, I guess our story is that Robi and I were high school sweethearts who just kept growing and changing together and never let ourselves grow apart. We started dating just before Robi started college, and my dad always said that I made Robi a little more grounded and he made me a little more fun. I think that's true. We both valued education a great deal, and supported one another through my 2 degrees and Robi's 3 degrees. Education continues to be important to us, and one of our big goals is to put Flannery through college ourselves. Just before having Flannery, we became Orthodox, and that has shaped our marriage significantly, too, in that we both want to pass down the importance of spirituality to our children. We are both thinkers and planners, and we like having systems for things. For example, when we go camping, we make lists and start packing weeks ahead of time. And when we were picking out names when we were pregnant with Flannery, we had an actual spreadsheet that we kept to help us rank names every so often to see which names remained favorites over time. We're never the same couple for too long, which I think is good for us. We expect one another to change, so it's not scary when we have to reevaluate things together every now and then.

I'm sure I'm leaving lots of things out, but that's a good start.



What's your family narrative? Or your relationship narrative? Or your own individual narrative? I'd love to hear it!

By the way, that's my beautiful Grandma Norma in the photo! She was a WAC (member of the Women's Army Corps) way back when. Gorgeous, huh?