Narrative

 The stories we are told about our families form a narrative of their lives.  But do we believe them?

I never asked questions about my family when I was young, but I did hear stories - when they actually spoke in English and not Polish or Italian.  There would always be lots of shouting and hand-waving and I was never sure what to believe.  In recent years, my older relatives have disclosed things that I never heard about growing up.

I never knew that my mother had dropped out of high school in her senior year.  She used to say that she never got her diploma because she never finished her government class requirement - she neglected to say it was her own fault for dropping out.

My father's sister let it rip one day about how much she hated one of her sisters-in-law.  She and her brother were close and the revelation really surprised me.

I have heard so many stories.  And what I have learned in the hearing and retelling is that we put our own slant on the narrative.  I discovered that if you tell negative tales about someone to someone who likes the person, they don't believe you.  You must be making it up or mistaken.  

And I realized that life is truly like politics.  We like the narrative that agrees with out beliefs.  Years ago when I was a union president while working for the City of Detroit, the city's representative told me that all life is politics and I should get used to it.  The older I get, the more I realize he is right.  And so it is with the narrative of our lives.

My suggestion is that we each write the narrative of our life that we want to leave behind.  I started that project years ago but kept digressing from what I wanted to say and never finished.  At the least we could write our own obituary - a dreary but necessary thought, especially since when my ex-husband died, my son called to get information for the obituary.  Never thought I would be doing that.

And there is always stuff about us our kids just do not know.  In a conversation with one of my sons recently, I mentioned something about when I was teaching and he said he never knew I taught.  So, I explained that I had worked in a teaching hospital associated with the University and we had ten medical technology students each year and I had each one for three weeks at a time and I taught them clinical enzymology - yeah, it's not something that ever comes up in  a conversation nowadays.

Each of us has a narrative, and it really is something we should pass down to our future family.  And my hat goes off to all those biographers of great people.  I do not know how they gather all that information and put it into something I enjoy reading.  That is truly amazing.  Try writing your own bio and realize how hard it is.