The Stories We Tell

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. When I became a woman, I gave up my childish ways.” – 1 Corinthians 13:11

There may be no harder quest than for one human heart to understand another.  It is this magnetic binding, this unsurrenderable pull we have towards each other that beckons our unfolding of each other’s stories.  Even the most guarded and tightly kept of us are impervious to this pull.  Perhaps more so than those whose pulls are uncovered; it takes more energy to disguise it, rendering it all the more discoverable.

My mother was never particularly emotionally open.  Always composed, proper, and contained, she had learned, much as all poor, Catholic, city girls growing up in the 1940s had, that to be a lady was to be mutely minimal.  I’m not sure this ever even seemed unappealing to her, but it did to me as little girl.  I remember wanting, wishing her to be more, say more, live more.  As a child, this yearning washed over me, and resounds with me still in rippling, sharp pangs every time I unsurface a memory of she and my dad fighting, or me pleading with her for stories and information.  She never unlocked much and rarely let anyone in.  This would make me furious and indignant as a girl.  I would never be like that, I said.  I would be audible and unashamed and unboxed.  I would tell without being asked.  I would be different.

Sauntering into adolescence, this attitude brought me absurd amounts of conflict with my authoritarian father, who counteringly understood the importance of raising daughters different than their mother but who was entirely unwilling or unable to know how to readjust to them.  The tension in our house was always palpable.  More often than not, worlds and directions collided, and words and tears found themselves racing up staircases to hot bedrooms, shoving furniture, slamming screen doors.  Through this chaos, my father would yell and my mother would cry.  Finding neither of those two options suitable, I would lay in my bed, silent and overflowing, after refusing to permit myself to yell and steeling my resolve second by second not to cry.

Once, after a particularly unpleasant spectacle, my mother sat on the side of my bed and stroked my hair.  “I was engaged once, before your father,” she told me softly, reaching for a tissue to continue drying her face.  “His name was Tom.  He was a kind, gentle, caring man.  I loved him more than anything.  Sometimes I wish it would have been different.”  I lay there mesmerized, my turn to be mute.  “He was killed in Vietnam.  I’m still close to his family.  I think about him all the time.”  As my mother sat and stared into the resonant post-whirlwind darkness, she gave me no more and no less.  I made it about me.  I didn’t know as a child how to receive it as being about her.  Why hadn’t she married a man less like my father?  How would my life have been different, with less time spent heaving between the sheets and between the draws of yelling or crying.  Why did adults not get this.  I would be different.

A few weeks ago, a decade or two down the road, I was preparing for Memorial Day to kick off a summer of, again, me.  I’d been pondering my epic search for a man, readying my friends for a few warm months of enjoyment, shenanigans, blogging, and maybe ultimately finding my brilliant, kind, literary, cultured, compassionate, educated, elusive man – not too much like my father, since I was not too much like my mother, I resolved.  Always in the back of my mind guiltily believing that I was somehow superior to my parents – waiting to marry, making better choices, being more selective, more educated, not settling.  The fact that I did not arrive at this lifeview of my own preteen accord did not specifically occur to me.  I was scrolling through Facebook on my phone, at a picnic near the warm, breezy lake, skimming status updates and sunny scenes, when my breath was swept from within me.  A friend of my mother’s had posted a picture and a Memorial Day caption: “In memory of PFC Thomas Schaller, my mom’s little (and only) brother, my uncle and godfather, who was killed in Vietnam in 1965 at the tender young age of 23.  I was only 4 but I remember well the huge hole it tore in our family.  Eternal thanks to you, Uncle Tom, and to all those who fought and gave the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom."

Here in front of me, while I frolicked and reveled in my own triumphs and defeats in finding a man (and in how much better of a selector I was being than my parents had been), was a man I would never know, yet had always somewhere pondered.  The worn, crooked black and white scan of his army photograph, uniform pressed, face structured but kind, set my mind racing to possibilities, doubts, longings, parallels.  This was the man my mother had loved.  This was the person she’d chosen.  And then he was gone.  It was gone.  It was everything and then nothing.  I felt myself weakening and sat in the grass still staring at my phone.  The quest for love is universal, no matter how cleverly contained or unspoken or unshared.  How strange it is to see one’s parents as adults, as oneself, as a life.  Suddenly we didn’t seem so different, my mother and me.  And at once, painted clarity washed over me.  And I wanted to yell and cry at the same time.

Growing up, I never understood why my mother’s friend Karin and her family were always invited to our big family birthday parties.  My mother always had contact books full of friends, but now their closeness made sense to me.  Karin was Tom’s niece, and my mother had remained friends with their family after Tom’s death.  I messaged Karin right away after seeing her post, and she told me how hard it had been for my mom and for all of them.  She also added how hard it must have been for my father as we grew up, to know he was my mother’s second choice, her replacement after losing her real love.  This had never occurred to me, and it quieted me in ways few things can.  Thinking of my father and his wild manner, and the fiery spirit that I seem to have inherited from him, it made me see his journey in an entirely new gaze.  It gave my Pearl Prynne self-identification – Scarlet Letter child as a fusion of repellant energies – this game-changing jolt.  The decisions we make here in our twenties and the things that happen to us are revolutionary.  The people we choose, the events that unfold, the narrative we weave, it will all mean something when someone somewhere, sometime, realizes the weight of its meaning.  “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” reflected Annie Dillard.  This unfolding was jostling my own reflections of finding life and love with another.  It was surreal.

When I told my mother I had seen Tom's picture, she was quiet and blank.  "Yes," she said.  That was all.  No more, no less.  We carry the lives we've been given and the lives we've chosen.  It was unspoken between us how she understood more than I'd realized my grief over my semi-recent loss of a great love.  We are not that different. 

A few weeks following, on Father’s Day, I was having a quiet morning coffee with my dad at a café near our house.  I was recounting the story of the painful ending of this five-year relationship with a man I knew my father had never particularly liked.  “I never got a good vibe from him,” my father explained.  “He wouldn’t look me in the eye.  Man to man, that’s something he should do.  I didn’t feel what I felt he should feel for you.”  I listened, more attentively than I generally had.  “And I saw a lot of myself at that age in him,” my father gingerly continued.  “I didn’t like that.  Not for you.”  Rarely speechless, I didn’t know what to say.  Just as the breath had been knocked out of me at the park on Memorial Day, here again I found myself forcing a swallow and not knowing whether to yell or cry.  But having advanced beyond running under my covers, I softly told my dad, “Thank you.”  Softly, but loud enough to hear.

This quest we make is a shared one: for knowing why the other says, does, is.  For finding someone to walk beside who transcends our days of crying under the sheets, or being too minimal, or yelling too much, or holding out until someone worthy of all her parents gave her (and they wanted to give her but couldn’t) comes along and shakes their hand.  For seeing the pain and struggle in the stories the others tell, and for aligning our stride with theirs, if only to show them they do not walk alone.  For not making it about us, like children do.  For affirming that we are no better, or no worse, than those who’ve gone before us, or go with us, or who will come after us.  And that the most worthy quest of all is to integrate your own story into a version other people can access, so that the person who most closely, intimately energizes your own spirit will choose you, and you will choose them.  And if you’re lucky, they won’t be taken from you.  And if you’re lucky, your children will hope for you to sit on the edge of their beds and tell them about the things you’re doing now.  And they’ll know that it’s not so much about whether you yell or cry; it’s about letting something leave your mouth.