Oh, the Stories We Tell
by Gary Drevitch
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Becoming a parent brings a lot of surprises. One is the discovery that you suddenly have an audience passionately interested in your personal history, undramatic as it may be. My son and daughter absolutely hang on the stories I tell about my own childhood, and about how I interacted with my parents, particularly my late mother, whose company they themselves only enjoyed for a few years. They can tell you that she packed a cheese sandwich on pumpernickel and a box of raisins in my lunch box every day, that she let me walk to school by myself by the end of kindergarten, and that whenever she knew I was lying, she would tell me, “You’re full of old shoes.”
I think part of the fascination is that kids who don’t get to see much of their grandparents are looking for other ways to feel like part of their parents’ extended families. So they absorb whatever information they can get, and then feel grown-up when they can relate their own experiences to those stories. My son got a splinter last week, and warned me to make sure I didn’t do what I told him my mom once did—having failed to recognize a splinter in my hurt knee, she rubbed it with tender loving care until the wood became so deeply embedded that I eventually had to go the hospital for stitches. It wasn’t Mom’s best moment, of course, but the kids like how it shows that my parents were as flawed as they know their own dad is.
The interest extends to my siblings as well. When my daughter was a toddler and her crib was moved into my son’s bedroom, I told him how my big sister used to come and rub my head and back when I was a baby crying in the crib next to her room so I’d go back to sleep. Days later, he proudly told me how, one night when I’d slept through my daughter’s late-night crying, he got up and played a music box for her so she’d go back to sleep, “just like Auntie S. did for you, Daddy!” He’s rarely been more proud of himself.
You have to be careful how you use these stories. A couple of times, I’ve told the kids stories of youthful recklessness that have backfired. The kids know, for example, that during the Blizzard of 1978, my sister and I jumped out of our suburban second-story window onto a massive snowdrift against our house. So now whenever we get a few inches of snow, they’re ready to hurl themselves out of our sixth-story Manhattan apartment window.
There’s also the temptation, once you see how eager the kids are to live out their own versions of your childhood, to abuse the power of these stories. I’ve come close to telling the kids how, when I was a kid and my mother told me to brush my teeth, go to the potty and get into to bed, I always did it right away because I wanted to make her happy. But I can’t do it. I’m not sure the kids would believe me, for one thing, and besides, the true stories are too precious.
Gary Drevitch is a former assigning editor at Teen People, Parade Publications, and Scholastic. He’s also a dad with three young kids. A veteran producer of educational content for McGraw-Hill, Scholastic Inc., and Time Inc., he’s written several non-fiction books for children.
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