“Have I ever told you the story about the time that my teacher killed a deer in the middle of my senior English class?” my father-in-law asks my boys when they complain about school being boring. He has, but that does not stop him, or them, from getting wrapped up in the details of the biggest buck that anyone had seen, an English teacher who loved to hunt, and a classroom in rural Pennsylvania in the 1960s. My father-in-law is a prolific storyteller and my boys beg for another story every time they see him.
That’s a pretty common story, isn’t it? Well, not hunting deer in the middle of class, but story of children begging us for just one more story. Every night at bedtime our homes rings with pleas for just one more story, just one more adventure. We joke about our parents sharing stories throughout our lives about their lives, walking up a hill, both ways, in the snow to school. We do it too, reminiscing, sitting with friends and telling the stories of who we were and what we did. Our stories are by turns funny and sad and serious and silly, our stories define our lives. The lives that we lived and the lives that we are still hoping to live.
We live every great adventure and mundane moment of our lives twice, the first time when we live it and the second when we retell the story. Our words and our stories are powerful because our lives become great or boring, scary or safe, in the retelling.
As parents, we have learned to use this to our advantage. A few months ago, my youngest son, age four was jumping on the couch, and in a twist not surprising to parents of little boys anywhere, he fell, hit his head on a table and needed to go to emergency room for stitches. Like any four year old he started the experience crying and ended it with a lollipop, a sticker and a few staples. If you asked him about it that night, he would have started crying again, upset with his memories of fear and pain. But, if you ask him about it today? He will proudly tell you about his Harry Potter scar, about how his head is so hard Daddy had to check on the table, and about how at our hospital you get lollies. What is the difference? The difference is not that his experience changed but rather our retelling of it did. We have spent the intervening weeks talking about his courage, his cool scar, the nice doctors, and the lollipop. Our story could have been about all the blood and how Mama cried, how much it hurt, and how bad it was, but we made a conscious choice not to tell it that way. We have filled his head with a story of strength which, in turn, has drowned out his fears. The story he is reliving is one of a brave boy and a cool scar.
There is interesting research out there about the power of stories and the experience of trauma. We know that not everyone who experiences trauma has the same response, two people can experience the exact same car accident, or global pandemic for that matter, and have vastly different emotional responses. The question for us becomes, why, what is the difference between the person that moves through trauma relatively untouched and the person deals with lasting impacts. There are many protective factors that researchers have explored, but the one that I keep coming back to, is that it is not the initial traumatic experience that causes a trauma response, but rather the retelling of the trauma story that has lasting impacts. If we consider it in this situation, we can see how our retelling of this story will have an impact on us and our children. Are we telling the story of fear or of hope? I do not say this to minimize the very real crisis we are in, but rather to give another perspective on our future narrative. We do not need to gloss over the things that are real and true, it is from the hardest truths that we grow the most, but we must be careful to not end our story mired in the pain and heartache, we must not lose sight of the glimmers of hope and joy. We have the choice as to how this story ends, we write the last chapter. We decide what story we retell, what story we relive.
Our words and our stories have power. Let our stories be ones of hope, of love, and of courage in the face of the impossible. When this is over, and one day this will be all over, what will your story be?
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