The Stories We Tell Ourselves
The Stories We Tell Ourselves: 15 July 2023
Jack just called from the barn. The Sr. Highs have returned from the 3-day campout. (Last night it poured rain. They’re making memories, I thought as I dozed off.) Everything he carried was wet, and he was wearing his glasses that I hadn’t thought he’d even brought to Montreat. He couldn’t stop grinning. This is the long game I’ve been playing. This is my gift to my children, and they are my gift to the world.
I amazed myself in feeling this, as I’ve been stewing over their recent behavior in a summer worship service.
We started off well, and I was musing on the preacher’s observation that whenever we offer anything to Jesus, he blesses it (gives thanks), breaks it, and the offering is enough. With extra to spare. I’d not thought of offerings of time and talent like loaves and fishes.
My happy revelation dissipated as the joy and pride I’d felt for my children at the beginning of the service veered off track in line with their antics, through annoyance and disappointment, banking off embarrassment straight into the overwhelming desire to apologize to the nice couple behind us. The peace we passed in the beginning of the service was surely suspect and stale by the end of the sermon.
I was so distracted and disgusted that I considered leaving when we got up for Communion. Could this be the major contribution of my life: these self-absorbed and rude children set loose in the world? This is my legacy?
I’ve been thinking about legacy, of what we leave behind, as I’ve culled through 70 years of my parents’ (and older generations’) memorabilia. The universe of papers, furniture, tchotchkes, mementos, most without reference or context. It’s more mental than physical labor. A thousand yes or no judgments. A thousand secondary decisions: if yes, where does it live in the house? If no, where is its next home? Trash, recycle, gift, Goodwill. So many piles.
I do not want my children to scale this same mountain, so I’ve been putting my own house in order. Some parts were easy: If I hadn’t wanted my mother’s college notebooks and papers (and she clearly hadn’t looked at them since sealing the box in 1958), then my children won’t want mine. I enjoyed flipping through them and then put them in the recycle pile. I saved and labeled a representative few pictures from each era. I filled two donation boxes with empty frames.
But it took a whole day to go through K-12 memories. Mama had saved every report card. I had saved so many little illustrated stories, so many horse drawings, such trivial trinkets. High school athletics, extracurriculars, church activities. Early scaffolding of the person I was building. My children do this too—saving tokens that prove they did a thing, that they saw a thing.
I recycled boxes of letters from a substantial early era of correspondence. I’d over-explained myself to people who were busy building their own early scaffolding. But I also kept cards from aunts and uncles, brothers, cousins. Graduation cards and invitations. The heft of the accumulated paper buttressed my belief in myself as known, seen, loved. Each envelope a thin brick in the wall of my self-esteem.
The college and early adulthood correspondence was harder to dismiss. Far fewer correspondents but much weightier content. The card from my grandmother awaiting me in the Leadville, Colorado bunkhouse when I arrived for my summer job. My brother’s response to a request for advice. Fat envelopes with declarations of love from boys I don’t remember. Heartbreaking collections chronicling the surge and sputter of relationships I do remember. And so, so many letters from Mama. Letters to every address I’ve ever lived until 2006, the year she died. Meaningful, indeed foundational at one time, but no longer. My children will neither understand nor care to reconstruct their mother’s early life. And why should they? I kept the letters for me, until I no longer needed their ballast.
“Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe?”
I had a little show-and-tell for Jack and Emma. This is the coconut my friend John mailed to me from Hawaii, postage stapled to the husk. These are pictures of my first wedding; check out this beautiful Quaker marriage certificate signed by everyone in attendance. That was my first house, a duplex in Columbia, recognize that furniture? See that display of feathers? Here they are! I collected them in 1989 from the aviary on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. Watch how you can zip up the barbicels when the barbs separate, and how the downy fluff near the base of some feathers doesn’t have barbicels, so it can trap air and keep the bird warm. These are pictures from my summer semester at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, England.
They were appropriately interested and then went back to what they’d been doing. I gathered everything except a few of the pictures, dutifully labeled, and threw it all away.
The handwritten research papers, the letters, the duplicate pictures with negatives all peg me as one of a transitional generation. 95% of my photos and letters originated before the turn of the century. With the 21st century came the advent of digital everything. We no longer write many letters; we don’t print many photos. I have given my children a great gift in sorting and culling through a history they don’t need or want, but they will have the greater burden of culling through the digital history that records their lives. God bless them.
In all of this sorting an embarrassing truth became impossible to ignore. My young self thought that it was special, was meant for future greatness. Thus, the careful cataloguing of a life that posterity would delight to recreate. Such hubris. At the same time, though, I keenly felt my miniscule unimportance in the vastness of life. What, exactly, was I meant to do or be that would be so singular and necessary for history to record? What was I to offer?
“Some journals are kept with the unspoken hope that they will be discovered long after the diarist’s death, the fossil of an extinct species of one. Others thrive on the belief that the only time each evanescent word will be read is as it’s being written. And others yet address the writer’s future self: one’s testament to be opened at one’s resurrection. They declare, respectively, “I was,” “I am,” “I’ll be.” ”
My boxes of memorabilia attempted to declare all three. I grieved for my younger self, because I wasn’t, I’m not, and I won’t be. But acknowledging this offered some hope for my future self. What I was can’t be changed, what I am is enough, what I will be is still an open quest.
I still have things to offer. If I can allow my offering to be blessed and broken, then as the apostle Paul wrote, I can trust that God will accomplish with it abundantly far more than I could ask or imagine.
And that, of course, is why I show up at church most Sundays. To be loved into the reaffirmation that I have a role to play in God’s great vision of redemption.
I come to church because the music, the scripture, the consideration of someone else’s wisdom, the discipline of sitting still: all of this calls me back into relationship. To stay in relationship with God, with family, with humanity, with the Earth. To honor the duty and responsibilities I’ve shouldered, especially the hard ones, like being a mother. I come to receive instruction, love, boundaries, encouragement, and correction so that I can be strong enough to offer those same gifts to all of God’s beloved creatures. Even my own horrible children, grumpy and misbehaving throughout a worship service in a conference center established to praise and glorify God. The irony was crushing.
I made myself stay. I stayed for the gift and promise of the Table, renewing my commitment to stay in relationship, not to run away. I was given the bread and the wine; I murmured thanks be to God. I concentrated on the music on my way up the aisle. I exhaled a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
Back in the pew, my children whispered, “my bread was stale” and “yeah, the bread wasn’t good.” Only extreme discipline kept my brain in my skull and my hands off their necks.
I thought: How can you be so self-absorbed in your smallness that you disparage the gift that is offered? It’s not about the actual bread for crying out loud, and I almost was. Also, how can you be so rude to ruin something you know is important to others around you? Shall I act this way through the next Marvel movie?
But I surprised myself by also thinking: It’s kinda cool that you’re so comfortable in church that you allow yourself to act like jerks. That’s part of the unconditional love of family. Of course, the actual lesson is that unconditional love can engender respect and love in return, calling us outside our smallness and into relationship with the God who, through us, can do abundantly far more than we could ask or imagine. Such love is both comforting and challenging. If you stop snickering long enough to pay attention.
After the benediction I made sure Mark had the car key and I bolted for the door.
I took the creek trail, much used and worn now, but when Mama first showed it to me 50 years ago, it was a narrow path hidden among the rhododendrons. We would drop flowers right off of this rock and watch them race down the current and out of sight. She told me stories that her grandmother, my namesake, had told her, about the water-striders letting the fairies ride on their backs across the creek. How the crickets would sit on the toad stools to play music for the woodland dances. She made it magical and alive and everlastingly beloved. She showed me that the world is sacred.
The heritage of multi-generational traditions, property, worship, belovedness—and the freedom to struggle with it—this is the legacy I’m giving my children. What memorabilia could possibly exemplify that gift?
Dear ones, will you remember seeing the mother bear with two gamboling cubs padding silently across the croquet pitch? Will a hymn wring your heart with a memory of my voice, my hand with yours on the hymnal? What will be the thing that causes you to understand your oh-so-casually-wielded power to swell or to wound my heart? What will remind you that you were loved beyond measure or language?
Most likely it will take shouldering the beautiful burden of your own children. And if you’re luckier than I was, your mother will still be alive to celebrate, and commiserate, and maybe take over for a while, so you can walk home the long way by yourself.
