 |
| Our stories are not carved in stone. |
~Geneen Roth, This Messy Magnificent Life
My childhood was miserable. And it was magical. When I was five years old, my mother read 2001: A Space Odyssey to me and my eight-year brother, passing along her passion for books and stories. My father spent freezing nights flooding our back yard for an ice rink so we could skate through the Canadian winter.
I would wake to the sound of my parents fighting. Slurred accusations. Loud threats.
As I've grown older, my story seems more complicated. As my parents grew older, they seemed more complicated. I adored my mother, who died after 25 years of sobriety, the same mother who routinely called me selfish in my teens and insisted I cared about nobody but myself. My father, who celebrated his 89th birthday last week, is one of my favorite people in the world. He's kind and generous, a true gentle man. But he's also the dad who, when I was 14, left me to cook and clean and tend to my alcoholic mother, while he sat in his chair with a glass of rye and a cigarette, consumed by self-pity.
Stories from our past, as Geneen Roth says, can become so rigid that they might as well be bars, locking us behind them.
"If we believe them we are defined by them," writes Roth. She isn't suggesting that our stories aren't true, of course. Our husbands cheated on us. That is indisputable. No, what she's suggesting is that the stories we attach to what happens to us can become shackles. And that they are much more open to interpretation.
Take for instance, this familiar story: My husband cheated. He couldn't possibly love me and do such a thing. I mean nothing to him and that isn't going to change.
Maybe you're telling yourself this story. I certainly did. And I believed every word.
I clung to that story as gospel truth.
And it stopped me from doing anything other than stewing in my own misery, even as a tiny part of me doubted its veracity. Yes he cheated on me. But was it true that he couldn't possibly love me or was that part of an old story? Was it true that I meant nothing to him? Was it true that our marriage was never going to change?
The story of my parents' betrayal of me had kept me in bad situations for years before I realized that I had the agency to change my own life. My husband's betrayal of me was such a familiar one, I knew it by heart. And underscoring every word of it was this: There is something wrong with me. I am unloveable. This will never change.
Because I believed that story, I was defined by it. And it paralyzed me.
But our stories do not predict the future. They tell us nothing about "forever". Our stories have something to teach us, absolutely. But the lesson might just be what's written between the lines. The stories we tell ourselves about our stories.
My mother got sober. My father got saner. My husband wrestled with some old demons. I got clearer about what I will and will not tolerate in my life. I treated myself as lovable and began to see that it is true.
The story I'd been telling myself about my miserable childhood wasn't the whole story. There was magic there too.
