The Stories We Tell

The last few years I have scanned all of the old family pictures. The albums were falling apart, the plastic coverings were degraded and starting to affect the photos. I'm necessarily sure why I did this. I am the last in my family, I am not married, I have no children, and there is no one after me who will care. I imagine when I die that the my computer will be wiped, donated, and the images will just disappear.

But the older I get the more I realize how much who I am was shaped by my very earliest years. And the older I get the more I realize that the majority of that time was a fiction. It was a story Mom told, then repeated, until it became THE story, replacing the truth, whatever that may have been. Now with Mom gone, that stories she told, are all that remain except for some artifacts- a jade elephant with a broken trunk, these pictures, and old wooden box.

The story Mom told was that we lived in a commune house outside of Washington D.C, called The Big House.

It was probably, supposedly, exactly what you would think a hippie, commune house was in the early 1970s. It was a group of friends who raised their children together, two born a month apart and inseparable as children. It was cinder block bookcases and plants and friends. It was communal meals and shared ideals.

It was shared work and shared care. It was long nights sitting on the floor, listening to vinyl. It was the smell of pot so prevalent some of the young folks growing up in this house *may* have thought this was incense, since both seemed the same. It was a group, a collective, that carried this sense of family with them. So when a group decided that D.C. was no longer the best place, they decided to migrate to a small set of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina. It was different but in many ways the same. People talked about being close to nature, taking long walks on the beach, collecting a ridiculous amount of shells and beach glass. It was people living hand to mouth, but focusing more on the quality of life, the love, the comfort, the support, than anything else.

It was an ideal, it was a dream. Later it was watching The Big Chill and not thinking that folks were the ones who gave up but the one who stayed doing what they originally started doing to give back. 

But it was also all a lie. The group stopped talking. One went into beach development and real estate, far removed from, and a total betrayal of the original ideals. Another went onto work for corporations and multi-million dollar companies, although would have denied they had given up on living their true life. Another over dosed, the life an excuse for the drugs that soon became all consuming.

But I was much older before I realized it was all a lie. I believed the story I was told. I believed that people were innately honest. I believed it was our individual job, our duty, to do what was best for the common good. I believed that people should always work together for the common goals of the community. I believed in following my heart, the strength of my convictions, and going where I was needed. It's why I'm a teacher. It's why I'm a writer. It's why I collect beach class, and collect vinyl, and spend hours on the floor listening to vinyl, and burn incense (the actual kind). 

The dissonance between my innate nature, shaped by believing these stories, and the reality of the world, is the source of my greatest disappointment in life. 

I do not do well with institutions. I do not do well with things that are not in the best interests of all. I don't understand people who lie or are duplicitous. I don't understand why everyone cannot work together to accomplish things that best serve our community. I am continually hurt by people who do these things. I am always surprised when people say one thing and do another. I am disappointed in people and structures I have placed my faith in. I am constantly in trouble for saying these things, advocating, standing up. Trust me, if I was capable of sitting there and not saying anything, I would have done it by now. Because me being me, me buying into my Mom's stories, is my greatest strength and foundation, it is the basis for my quiet life, but it is also the greatest source of hurt. People don't like it when you tell them things are bigoted and racist. People do not like when you speak up, speak out, demand more.

My advocacy has both been of varying degrees over my adult life and a constant. The older I get the more I think it is my privilege and responsibility to do all I can with what I have.

So I will stick with my Mom's stories. I will weave my own using her foundation. And every day continue to believe that maybe the story can be true, if people just want it to be.