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Thanks for the Memories

Sharing personal history can be a powerful tool for getting closer to the ones you love.

by Arlene Silverman

Monday, March 19, 2007

“Today, people are so disconnected that they feel they are like blades of grass, but when they know who their grandparents and great-grandparents were, they become trees, they have roots, they can no longer be mowed down.”
–Maya Angelou

Steve Richardson of Winona, Minnesota, has one major regret in his life: he didn’t ask his mother about her childhood before it was too late. The sixty-year-old retired university administrator revealed to ELDR magazine that it was not until he found decades-old diaries and letters in his mother’s home after she died in 2004, that he realized that there were “hidden years” in her life.

The mother he knew as a child and grown adult had little to do with the woman who had existed before he was born. “She had been a very different person in these diaries,” Richardson says. “For example, she used to watch football games, basketball, which she showed little interest in when her children came on the scene.”

“The curious thing, as I look back is that we not only took Mom’s premarried life for granted; we never prodded her for details either. It was as if we were more comfortable with the mother we knew than with the mysterious one we had never seen.

I regret having missed many opportunities in my lifetime, but none so much as the chance to ask my mother about those hidden years.” Richardson is not alone. At 72, I still regret not having asked my own grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles about their childhoods. I know the broad details: Eleven children in my mother’s family, four in my father’s—poverty in my mother’s family, middle-class comfort in my father’s. But there are so many questions I did not ask.
How did my grandfather’s Eastern European Jewish family end up for a generation in Wales, for heaven’s sake? What was it like for my mother to lose her mother when she was only four years old? Determined to not have that happen to my own children, I gave my daughter Becky an assignment for my 65th birthday. I asked her to write down questions about my life before she was born— and I would then answer them in writing.

Persistence of Memories
Happily, the landscape is changing. People in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of passing family stories down to their own children.

The so-called “sandwich generation” has, in fact, become the Dagwood of an aging population. As couples wait longer to start a family, they are more likely to have young children who will want to know about their grandparents and great-grandparents long after these forebears are gone.

Increasingly, family trees are drawn with the precision of Power Point presentations. There are thousands of blogs on the Internet, where memories of parents flourish—both for the general blogosphere and for children to come.

Tape players and camcorders hum around the nation with adult children asking their parents questions for posterity. A few people—well, maybe one or two in each U.S. time zone manage to take their family photos out of the cartons at the back of the closet and actually organize them into handsome, leather-bound albums lined up like shiny new encyclopedias on the shelf.

Indeed, for Evan Mangan of London, the “ah-ha” moment came when he looked at his three-year-old son Dylan and realized that, while the child’s grandmother was, at 65, active and healthy, it was important that Dylan know stories about the grandmother’s generation and also about generations before. So Mangan set out to ask his mother who lives in Kerry, Ireland, about her own childhood and that of her parents and grandparents.

A particular bonus, he says, were the photos that his mother talked about. “All those photos in my mum’s house—they’ve come to life. And the stories have been wonderful,” he says. “I learned that my mother met my dad when she was only 13, and my grandfather would go with a flashlight into the movie house to look for them and drag them home.” (Mangan has gone on to start a business alled Everyday Biographies in which adult children can arrange to have their parents’ lives researched and placed into a bound book.)

“What’s particularly important about memories is that things are changing so quickly,” Mangan says. “I’m only 37, and I remember when there were phonograph records.

We’re so technology based now. In talking to older relatives, it’s almost like opening a window to a different world.”

Tell Us a Story
Not everyone who wants to preserve memories takes to the camcorder or to professionally produced biographies.

Steve Richardson, who missed out on asking his mother about her life, is delighted that his father keeps a daily journal of past and present, the pages of which are bound each year as a family Christmas present.

And Martha Brockenbrough of Seattle, mother of two young daughters, knew that she had a responsibility to be a connection among generations, so she put together a list of questions to ask one’s parents: “Mom [or Dad] had a life before you,” she says.

In an article for encarta.msn.com, Brockenbrough presents a list of starter questions to ask a parent:

- What was the house you grew up in like?
- What was the best present you ever got as a kid?
- What was your worst/best day in school?
- Favorite relative?
- What did you do on your first date?

“Stories are what bind people together,” Brockenbrough says. “Stories reinforce the closeness of a relationship. When they’re about a parent’s or grandparent’s childhood, they help my children understand that time passes, that people grow up, and that there’s a cycle to life—but that the young and old have many things in common.”

As for me, as it turned out, my 65th birthday request was fulfilled beyond my wildest dreams. Instead of simply jotting her questions down informally, my daughter put together a large scrapbook with questions from my childhood through the time I met her father and started a family.

What has been interesting for me as the “elder” being questioned by the “younger” (my daughter is 38 and is herself a mother of a four-year old) is the fact that memories are not always pleasant to recall. A beautiful memoir, available on the Internet (albany.edu/journalism/lew05a. html), and written by Irene Lew, says that “writing about the past is much like peeling oranges.

The past is stubborn and difficult. The outside of an orange is tough, inedible and bitter. But as you slowly dig into the fleshy rind with your fingers…you will soon come to the juicy sweetness buried underneath. These are the memories that are worth the difficult act of writing about painful events; these are the ones that can be savored.”

That analogy certainly was true with me. As I tackled Becky’s questions, I realized that the answers were sometimes tough. “What was Sunday like in my house?” she asked. The fact is that I remember little about Sunday at my house, because I was rarely there. My parents were busy putting food on the table. My life was on the street.

Question: “What did my mom and I fight about?”
How could I tell my daughter that we fought about everything? We fought about my clothes. We fought about my grades, especially when in junior high I somehow managed to fail both sewing and gym class in one semester. “How can someone fail sewing?” she’d yelled.

My three siblings and I also fought, particularly the sister nearest my age, who, when stuck babysitting for me, threatened to send me to “Bad Girls’ School.” (Actually, the idea seemed kind of attractive. I was that kind of kid.)

The question that sent me reeling was, “What did you read as a child?” How could I say, “Not much?” My house contained a couple of copies of Reader’s Digest and Ladies’ Home Journal and maybe a book or two on how to crochet or make a pot roast.

My friend Susie and I spent hours on Saturdays at the main library. How could I tell Becky, though, that our favorite room there contained listening booths where we could dance, looking like manic puppets to passers-by, to the latest hits?

How could I tell her that my joy in unassigned reading didn’t happen till I started college and opened up Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”?

So I warned Becky that there would be memories that I would share with her that would hardly bring forth images of a Norman Rockwell hearthside. But, like the orange inside, there were memories, I told her, that were satisfying.

I remember my mother and I reconciling as she grew older. I remember laughter at dinners held at my aunt’s house for my mother’s raucous and earthy family. I remember how I met my husband and the joy of being pregnant.

Sharing my memories, in short, has been well worth peeling off the tough stuff and finding the sweetness within. As to the memories that were less than sweet, my daughter told me with a sly smile. “That’s okay, Mom. Wait till I write about my childhood.”

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