Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Changing the Story
The power of the narrative is incredible. If a story is told often enough, it becomes what people believe. It becomes the truth. It serves as the truth until a new truth emerges but even then most people are resistant to the revision of history, their own or others.
“No, it wasn’t really like that. It was like this.” It can be crazy-making, changing the narrative of one’s country or town or family. Right now I’m reading a book titled Everyday Klansfolk, White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan, in which the author, Craig Fox, uses evidence gathered painstakingly from local newspapers and membership records to make the case that the Klan in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana in the 20’s was really more like the local Elks Club than the vicious white-robed, cross-burning, lynching mobs described in the testimony of thousands of people. A meeker, much less scary, and more palatable Klan was created for the Upper Midwest palate.
This means that while we’re riding through Michigan seeing in our minds eye where the Klan might have ridden, feeling guilt or sympathy for people who may have been terrorized by the Klan, we’re imagining things that probably weren’t there.
Families are like that, too.
A family’s narrative is the great unspoken story of how things came to be. When we were in our twenties and thirties, my sister and I spent vast quantities of time weaving and re-weaving a family narrative in which our father was a selfish, business-obsessed man who was uninvolved with his family and our mother was stoic and long-suffering. Our blame for the family’s shortcomings was heaped on our father, he could do so little right even while we had to sift through the tiniest piles of his offenses to find sufficient evidence to label him a bad father.
My mother, on the other hand, was cast as a saint. Her chronic unhappiness, her many illnesses, and her other-worldliness was part of a person defined by the misfortune of her marriage. We, my sister and I, were definite and cruel in the creation of the family narrative. There was a villain and a heroine. We all but tied our mother on the tracks and watched for the train coming over the horizon.
But then, one night, not so many years ago, as I sat on the plaid couch in my 89-year old father’s TV room and he sat in his old brown leather recliner, he let out little hints about my mother. Nothing he said was intended to counter the damsel in distress narrative my sister and I had created because he never knew about that. He assumed, I think, that all along, I had understood the real truth.
My mother’s depression had started almost the day they were married, deepened after every child was born, and stayed a constant in their life together until the end. He said this matter-of-factly without accusing or reproach. He didn’t blame her. It was just reality. It was what happened. It was the truth.
Every day had been lived as a chore. Even though they clearly loved each other and made no effort to hide their affection, happiness was a foreign concept. People weren’t happy, they were quiet. Silent. He lived with that, the silence for sixty-four years. He never left. He never raged or blamed, at least not where we could hear him. He just lived his life the best way he could never knowing that we, his daughters, would later assign him the antagonist role in a very bad play.
Sometimes, I wonder what narrative my own children are constructing about their lives growing up in our family. What assumptions are they making? What truth do they believe? It is probably impossible to replace whatever narrative they have developed with the truth until they are ready to hear it, until they are sitting on the plaid couch like I did listening to my father. Things aren’t always as they seem is the lesson I learned that night. It’s a lesson to pass on if I can figure out how.
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Photo: Josh Applegate
15 Comments on “Changing the Story”
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
so interesting and i can really identify with this one, jan. i was always closer to my father, as he was the easy-going fun one, with the interesting job, stories and friends, who was gone a lot for work. my mother stayed home, was the enforcer of rules, and the tough one in the equation. we often clashed, she was angry and depressed and off a bit/a lot, and i could not understand her behavior. she acted out in terrible ways. we always blamed her for our unhappiness and just saw her as being so mean. and saw my father as ‘the good one.’
they finally divorced years later, he became truly happy when he remarried, he had ended up with a true partner and i’m still close to my stepmother, who is very kind, he became a great hands on grandfather, and my real mother went deeper into her negative emotions. this continued on until both of their deaths many years later.
only now, do i see that she suffered from many emotional and mental illnesses, left untreated, and that she was doing the best she could just trying to get through every day, even though being a mother did not come easy or naturally to her, and that he, was a part in all of this, not being there, cheating on her, and making things worse by knowing how to get her even more upset, it was an eye-opener. his way of dealing with it was not to deal with it, to escape into work and travel. neither one practiced a good way to approach a marriage, a family, but each of them were very human and probably coped the best way they could.
My mother used to say that no one knows what is in a marriage except the people in it. My parents had a really strong connection but there were sure some dreary times. Since no one talked about it, we were left to our own conclusions — not all of them accurate. But then, who were we to know, right?
Yes. for a long time we believed our mother was the stronger one of our parents, our father unable or refusing to accept change. As they grew older it became apparent that she was not coping with her life either. She had managed to keep up a front after we all left home, but in later life he was the one who coped and managed their daily lives, not her.
I sure hear you.
I have lived long enough to know that everyone’s perspective is slightly different from the truth or the way it really was. My siblings and I each have a different view of our childhood, in some cases startlingly different. Thoughtful post, thank you.
That is so true. Birth order, the years between kids. My brother and sister were 9 and 6 years older than me so I spent six years being an ‘only child’ and it was a fairly stressful time. They didn’t experience that – but their experiences had other ingredients I never saw. Interesting.
Reblogged this on Red's Wrap.
Sometimes it takes many years to realize that our parents were human.
In retrospect, I think my father had obsessive-compulsive disorder (I have it, so it wouldn’t surprise me) and struggled a lot with trying to convince the world that he had it all together when he really felt like he was falling apart. He was extremely high-strung and often drove me crazy with his nit-picking. Nonetheless, now that he’s gone, I miss him terribly. He was a good man, just an exasperating one.
I wonder if it’s possible to ever get the story straight about our parents. It is satisfying, though, to be able to think about them with more insight, like your seeing that your father may have had obsessive-compulsive disorder. It creates a new context that makes things that happened make more sense, don’t you think?
As I’ve grown older, I’ve had a more realistic view of my own family’s narrative. There was no heroine or villain. My parents aren’t perfect, but they are human and they love their children. Even when we’ve made mistakes. And I still love them even though they’ve made mistakes.
I agree totally!
When I was in my 40s, I had to ask my mother to remember that the man she was so anger toward was, in fact, the father I loved dearly. I asked her to please have these “venting” conversations with her women friends.
I understood a great deal – because of work, they only lived together full time after retirement. It wasn’t easy for either of them. They had some sort of deep love for one another – 65 years of marriage meant something!
However, I needed to be free to love each of them in my own way.
My mom may have felt betrayed, but it was a load not meant for an offspring.
That’s a line I’ve crossed sometimes, too. But I think I’ve learned my lesson.
I think you just helped to pass that lesson along with this post. You’ve got me thinking about the ways my own understanding of my parents and even my siblings has changed with each passing year. I’m grateful. I’m heading back east for a visit soon. I’ll keep this post in mind.
It’s sort of an unfolding story, I guess. Hope your trip back is a good one.