Tuesdays With Shirley
For more than a year now, I've been spending every Tuesday afternoon/evening visiting with my 94 year old mother, the woman who started me on my writing journey. We have a complicated relationship, as she does with all her children. As the last of her eight children, I have a unique perspective but not a special one. I've especially focused on asking her about the life she and my dad lived with my older siblings. I've heard some of those stories but not a lot, really, and it's bittersweet for me. It both strengthens my connection to our family and reveals it's fault lines - I was simply not a part of so much of it.
We talk about many other things, too, and my favorite discussions revolve around religion, human nature and, of course, the craft of writing ...the same things we talked about when I was a teenager and she and I lived alone without any of my other siblings. Without her realizing (I think) that I'm steering her in that direction, she's telling me her story; I'm recording some of our chats in the hopes of sharing that story, but she has resisted allowing me to write about her life. She wants control of her own story and, for that, I cannot fault her. Tell your story, Shirley ...everything is a story, especially the lives we lead.
We talk about many other things, too, and my favorite discussions revolve around religion, human nature and, of course, the craft of writing ...the same things we talked about when I was a teenager and she and I lived alone without any of my other siblings. Without her realizing (I think) that I'm steering her in that direction, she's telling me her story; I'm recording some of our chats in the hopes of sharing that story, but she has resisted allowing me to write about her life. She wants control of her own story and, for that, I cannot fault her. Tell your story, Shirley ...everything is a story, especially the lives we lead.