Storytelling — a Healing Journey
This story was inspired by Richard Keeling’s recent Story Hall post, Missouri, 1982.
I can remember my mother’s reaction to a tape I played of my father reading the stories he wrote of his life. It was several years after he’d passed. Mom was visiting us here in Virginia from her home at the time in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. That’s where she’d lived with Dad his last 24 years.
Up to that moment, I’d always had this vision of them as a unit, a united front of parenthood, a union that had created a stable environment for me to come home to, a place where I was allowed to incubate during my transition from my first early, wild attempts at taking adulthood by storm, to my more measured, earnest attempts to grow up with some sense of values and sensitivity to others.
They’d demonstrated decency and a way to live that I tried modeling as I went out from there to begin trying to master the difficulties of being an adult in the real world — in my case, an attempt to face that world as a sober individual, having discovered the very hardest way that alcohol and I did not mix well. After a couple of years alcohol-free, I also realized that no form of mind or mood-altering substance would ever work well with my system. I had to give it all up — even marijuana. Their guidance and example had been an immeasurable help to me as I struggled with that transition.
So, her reaction to Dad’s tape took me by complete surprise. “What kind of ego would think that anyone could possibly find all that crap interesting!” This was after we’d listened to his story-telling for about a half-hour drive from Arlington Cemetery, where he now resides, to our home. That’s when I realized Mom was very much her own person, and had very strong feelings about Dad and his stories that weren’t exactly aligned with my feelings about him and them.
I was even more surprised when she emerged as one of my greatest champions, years later, when I started writing up a storm upon discovering my own knack for storytelling, shortly after stumbling onto a storytellers’ site called Cowbird. Mom’s opinion meant a great deal to me — the way she never suffered fools lightly, I figured if my writing had Mom’s seal of approval, I must be onto something.
I was going through a period, at that time, of reclaiming parts of my past that I had, at various times, either run from, or had tried to paint with a broad brush of “my active years of addiction”, which entailed blaming everything that happened on the state of mind I was in, or escaping from, with the drugs and the booze. Looking at those periods of my life from that perspective, one kept moving forward, never looking back, always focused on building a new life. The problem with that, was, there was a large part of who I was, the very things and events that had made me who I was, that got left behind, and painted over with those broad brush strokes.
My newfound discovery of my gift of storytelling, allowed me to go back and revisit those “lost years” from a whole different perspective. Without judgement, just allowing a thread of a memory to come to the surface, then, upon writing about it, following that thread down into deeper memories, long since locked away in the dungeons of the mind, locked behind doors of judgement, unfairly in many cases. Allowing those locked away memories to come up to the surface allowed for a healing that I never expected, and a becoming whole, a more authentic person, than I thought possible. There had always been a part of me that felt like I had something to fear from those locked away memories. Now, I realized that all I had to fear was my fear of them. Brought out into the light, they were me — the whole person that I’d never allowed to grow up with me, as I became an adult.
I had, after all, gotten sober at age 22, and completely clean at age 25. I was only just then beginning to grow up, after a lot of hard years that led to those decisions. Having this opportunity to shine a new light on all those stories that had been neatly tucked away in the dungeons of my memory, allowed me to realize, and truly appreciate, who I truly was, and am. I consider it one of the greatest gifts I’ve been afforded in this life.
I think Mom might have sensed that, from some of my early stories on Cowbird, and her encouragement was hugely helpful to my continuing down those memory lanes I embarked upon, with a zest and a zeal that have served me well, ever since.
