The Good Word

As I mentioned in my latest post, my family had an early Thanksgiving celebration last week. Held at my parents’ house, we had a collection of three generations of the “Allen” family. Parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews.  All together, if I’m counting correctly, we had 18 people gathered around the table including, for the first time, the boyfriend and girlfriend of my nephew and niece.

There was a significant moment when my niece went around the room introducing her friend Aaron to everyone. He went to shake hands with my sister Karla, who introduced herself by saying, “Hi, I’m the fun aunt.”

I happened to overhear her.

“Now wait a minute,” I objected. “Why do you get to be the fun aunt?”

To be fair, Karla is really fun. She’s the one all of her nieces and nephews love to tease because she teases them right back. She’s always laughing about something, and her eyes actually sparkle when she talks. I kid you not. Still, being the Fun Aunt seemed like too enticing a title just to cede to her automatically. Which is how my sisters, Karla and Karyl, my cousins, Jodi and Lyssandra, and I all ended up sitting around a table debating the point.

Eventually, Karyl suggested that it would be intriguing to see if we could come up with the best one-word description for each of the five of us sitting around the table. It proved to be a more difficult task than we thought. Here’s a few examples of what we came up with.

Karla:

Still the heir-apparent to the “fun” title, we also came up with a few others:  ”sassy,” “complex,” “creative,” “warrior,” “jolly,” “boisterous,” and, my favorite, “feisty.”

Karyl

The first word everyone came up with was “sweet.” And Karyl is really, really sweet. My daughter Sarah loves the fact that Karyl calls her “Sweetie” and always makes sure everyone has enough food, warm sweaters and soft pillows. But to the rest of us who know Karyl in other contexts, “sweet” didn’t seem comprehensive enough. Karyl is the one who stays calm in turbulent situations, steadfast in what she believes, and is very smart.  Sitting around the table, we also came up with “wise,” “serene,” “brave,” and “observant.” Karyl also contributed that she thinks she’s the most reckless of the three of us, a topic I plan to explore further some day.

Lyssandra

My cousin Lyssandra is a fascinating person who has studied linguistics, French, and is now embarking on a course in Russian Studies with an eye toward working as a translator. She’s had a wide range of experiences and comes across as both serious and smart. Because Lyssandra and her family lived in another part of the country from the rest of us, we hadn’t spent much time with her until recently. Still, we knew enough to come up with some adjectives we thought would fit, including “adventurous,” “intentional,” and “independent.”

Jodi

My cousin Jodi could compete with Karla for all the same adjectives. She’s smart, sassy and independent. She always seems to be giggling about something and her eyes sparkle as well. (How did I miss out on the sparkle gene?) Because Jodi has a different set of nieces and nephews than I do, she probably wins the title of “Fun Aunt” in her own right. If I weren’t so happy to have her as my cousin, I would definitely want her for my aunt. For her, we assigned the words “sassy,” “joyful,” “mischievous” and “fun.”

Barbara

What did everyone come up with for me? I got words like “smart,” “sophisticated,” “encouraging,” and “earnest.” But really, who wants to be known as the “Earnest Aunt?” Although I am all those things at times, there is a playful side of me that isn’t captured by these adjectives. Although I couldn’t be sarcastic if my life depended on it, and I can’t come up with witty puns, I have been known to be silly, at least occasionally.

And maybe that’s the point. As my nephew Clancy (very perceptively) pointed out, the word that would describe me to my nieces and nephews might not be the same words used by my sisters or my husband or my parents. We play different parts with different people. We are all of those words and more.

Still, as I started to write this post, it occurred to me that as much as I worked to come up with words that accurately described other people, it could also be true that I was choosing words that accurately described different aspects of myself. When I call Karla “feisty,” I am connecting with the potential feistiness in myself. When I remark how intentional Lyssa seems, I am noticing a quality I want to cultivate in myself. When Karyl says I am “encouraging,” she is also commenting on her own abilities to encourage others. It’s an interesting idea that we are all mirrors for each other, holding up the qualities that we most admire in them, and at the same time most aspire to for ourselves.

So, which of us is the “fun” aunt? The short answer is, we all are.  In some way and to some people we are all fun. But that’s cheating. Karla told me that at the end of the evening when Aaron came to say goodbye to her, he told her that he’d decided that she was, after all, the Fun Aunt. He also told her that, if confronted, he would deny having said it.

So I guess if I were going to assign a word to Aaron, I’d have to go with “diplomatic.”

 

Creating a Life … One Story at a Time

“What’s the point?”

This is the question my father asked over the phone the other day when I mentioned that he should write some of the events of his life.  It seems obvious to me.  He climbed all 54 mountains in Colorado over 14,000 feet by the time he was 54 years old.  He was able to build every one of my bicycles when I was little and kept all of our cars running over the years, sometimes with nothing more than baling wire and duct tape.  He rides motorcycles with my husband, and plays bass in a band.  He has stories to tell!  And he will grant me this point.  But that’s not his problem.  He wants to know WHY he should write them down.

For the past four years, I have worked as a writer, a personal historian, a teacher, and a self-appointed nag, encouraging people to write about their lives.  I’ve taught workshops.  I’ve spoken at conferences and to groups of people fighting life-threatening illness with stories.  Still, the question I get the most is this one:  Why should I write my stories? Or its twin:  Does it really make any difference?

I am working to figure out the answer to these questions myself, and I have a few ideas.  Okay … I have a LOT of ideas.  I’ve been reading books on neurobiology and memory, on collage journals and narrative therapy. ( I’m also reading straight through an anthology of Pearls Before Swine comic strips, which I am sure will relate to the power of story in some way.)   I’m looking forward to using this blog as a forum to explore all these ideas in a more systematic way.  But mostly, I’m excited about the opportunity to create a conversation around this question, and to get feedback about what makes stories meaningful to other people.

In the meantime, let me start with this.  Stories are powerful.  And what’s more, they are powerful whether we write them down our not.

Have you ever had the experience of being in a new group – the first day of school or a summer camp – and were given an ice-breaker assignment to spend 5 minutes telling a stranger about yourself?  What if I asked you this question right now?  What would you say to me, a complete stranger?  Would you tell me about your job?  Your hobbies?  Why you like or dislike them?  Would you share where you were born or grew up? Or explain how you came to live where you do now? Think about if for a second.  Really.  Because this is your story.  Of all the possible pieces of information you could come up with to describe who you are, why are these the ones you choose? Are you aware that you’ve made a choice?

We all create personal narratives to explain our past experiences to ourselves.  As Jill Ker Conway, an Australian-American author best known for her memoir writing, once wrote:

“It’s important to scrutinize the plot you’ve internalized and find out whether it accurately represents what you want to be, because we tend to act out those life plots unless we think about them.” (“Points of Departure,” in Inventing the Truth:  The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser.)

This is where the powerful part comes in.  Writing about your life experiences is a perfect way to think about your story, and to decide if it’s the one you want to live. If not, you have an opportunity to create a new version by making different choices from all the options available to you.  You can create — or recreate — your life through story.