For Women’s History Month, search your story
“You should write about my mom,” my friend Tania said when I ran into her at the grocery store a couple years back and told her about my writing business.
Tania’s a pretty fast-talking chick to start with, but she sped up the story when she talked about “Omi,” as her children refer to her mom. Born in Berlin in 1940, Omi was forced out of her home at the end of World War II when the Russians invaded.
Omi and her sister spent years as refugees in West Berlin before immigrating to rural Massachusetts in the United States’ bobby-sox years. What followed was almost as traumatic as the war years, as they struggled to learn English, entered marriages, endured break-ups, had kids, shattered glass ceilings and established hard-as-nails reputations.
Tania, like most people I know, wanted to document all the details of Omi’s story before time took its toll, but she couldn’t get her mom to commit.
I suggested she send in the granddaughters, who could use the recording and transcription devices on their phones to get the bones of the story down: What years did things happen? Who helped her along the way? What decisions does she regard as pivotal? What images remain indelible? In my experience, there aren’t many grandparents who can refuse the progeny’s request for information.
Sure enough, Omi spent a couple hours answering Tania’s daughters’ questions; about Germany; about falling in love with their Casanova grandfather; about single parenting in the seventies.
Most of our parents tried to tell us some of their stories when we were kids. My dad would talk about how transformative his experience going away to Junior Achievement camp was and my mom wistfully recalled tidbits from tea times she shared with her beloved grandmother.
But teenagers aren’t always the best listeners. I am not sure what, if anything, my boys will retain of the stories I constantly share. Each birthday, I retell their birth-stories so they’ll at least have those down.
But I’m less confident about others, like the one I recap every anniversary, about how their dad and I worked together in the produce department of our local Krogers and fell in love making fruit and vegetable sculptures in the walk-in cooler behind the salad bar. I know it goes in one ear, stays long enough for some loving teases, and then it goes where unfortunately — many family-stories go: The fog of impenetrable memory.
After years of coaching stories out of people, as a journalist and a biographer, I have noticed that women’s stories, more than men’s, end up in that fog. When it comes to family history, moms get a lot of loving tributes. Dads get books and documentaries.
A few years ago, Wikipedia recognized a huge gender gap in their biographical content, indicating that just 15% of the site’s biographies were about women. In six years of concerted effort, it’s now up to 18.77%.
That’s a sad statement about the legacies of half the world’s population.
Recently, inspired in part by the deeply researched history of Isabel Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” the women in my book club asked me to help them initiate their own family history projects.
And, because it is Women’s History Month, I decided to focus on writing about the women in our lives. Wilkerson, who set out to write the “greatest untold story of the 20th century,” tapped into the stories of everyday people making life-changing decisions to pull up roots and move North.
Like Wilkerson’s characters, several of my book group friends’ family members had emigrated from far-flung places: Australia and Puerto Rico. A few who broached the idea of interviewing their moms and grandmothers experienced resistance: Who were they, these older women protested, to warrant a spotlight?
This resonated with all of us. I know from experience that there is a need to protect younger generations from the painful stories that have been a burden: the stories of families with traumatic physical or psychological abuse; the sad truth that many parents refused to let daughters follow their chosen paths; the difficulty of talking about regret and loss.
Not all parents are emotionally able to come to terms with their own past.
Some of those hurdles are surmountable with persistence, and a few tricks. It might take an adult child asking their parent to do a virtual walk-through of their old home or digging up an old photo album to elicit stories.
Sometimes offering subjects a chance to respond to their siblings’, coworkers’ or neighbor’s version of a mutual experience is enough to make them want to clear the record. There is no way to predict how they’ll respond.
One participant in my women’s workshop said that it took her several weeks to come to terms with the fact that her mother admitted to regret falling in love with and marrying her father.
Those kinds of bombshells aside, generational storytelling gives us a first-person account of history and provides us with depth and context.
I think we owe it to our families to know as much as we can about the important facets of our history.
With few exceptions, our ancestors overcame incredible odds to bring us into the world; and for many of us, the experiences they endured and the choices they made continue to impact our lives. I remember my mom telling me how she did a double-take when her grandmother, Mary McFadden, sat across from her drinking tea in her row house in working-class Pittsburgh and told her that she used to play in the ruins of a great castle on the rocky shores of her home in Donegal.
That romantic image made a big impression on my mom’s teenage brain, and has inspired three generations to travel across the ocean and renew relationships with cousins many times removed.
My great-grandmother died when I was young. I wish that someone had sat down with her and recorded her experience of being orphaned by age 8; her reasons for leaving home at 16; her first impressions of America as she assimilated into servitude with a wealthy Pittsburgh family.
Fortunately, her grandchildren have kept her story alive with memories of castles and violins and spring-cleanings and quiet moments in her kitchen.
Now it’s my turn to pull those details out of the fog and tuck them into a digital cloud so that they can inspire and guide future generations who might find themselves on rocky shores someday, looking for guidance.