Your story needs to be shared! 3

I have just finished reading one of the most beautiful gifts a mother can give to her children – the gift of a memoir about her life.  My friend asked me to read and make spelling corrections to her Mother’s memoir.  As I was editing it, I could hear Bar’s soft, honeyed, southern voice.  She told about what life was like in the small, Southern town she grew up in.  She told about finding and accepting her purpose in life.  She shared how the numerous children she did not birth but who she mothered found their way into her life.  (She has an abundance of love and was able to give it to her own six children and these other children.)  She shared funny, sad, and painful stories.  She is having her story copied and bound into a volume for each of her children.

I was deeply touched by what a unique and special gift this is.

We all seek explanations about where we’ve come from.  For many of us, our parents’ lives and reasoning are a mystery to us.  Many of them don’t talk about their lives willingly.  Many of us don’t ask for their stories or listen well when they start in on an anecdote that they may have told a dozen times or more.

One of the best things Bar wrote in her memoir is that she didn’t have a favorite child, despite her children’s assertions that each other was that special one.

I come away loving her even more than I did, for a life well-lived.  She’s never had a lot of money and, in many ways, grew up on the margins of life, yet she had abundant love, laughter and friends (including “menfolks” – you go, Bar!).

I am going to encourage my mother to open her memory bank and share her stories of growing up in Kinloch, Missouri – an all black city that was a full and wonderful place in her childhood.  I am going to get my husband to write or dictate to me his All American Black boyhood in Boston.  He had a wonderful, warm and loving childhood here in Roxbury/Boston.

We are each on a unique journey.  We all have stories that deserve to be told, that need to be recorded somewhere if for no other reason than to say, “we were here!”  If you are blessed enough to have your parents on this earth, please find a way to hear and preserve their stories.  If you don’t, write down what you remember and start on your memoir.  Your children and your friends will be most blessed that you did.