The Unreliable Narrator

My 84-year-old mother came over for dinner the other night. It was just her and me. We exchanged pleasantries while I cobbled together a dinner of whatever leftovers were in the fridge. This, after I had completed my first full week of back to school/work school year 2023-24 teaching my elementary age art students.

My mother always asks,

 “Anything new at school?” 

Usually, the answer is some silly story that a kid has said or done. Not this night. She got a tirade of how very tired I was:

“There are a whole lot of new young teachers at work who are so much sharper than I am these days. I sort of can’t keep up with all the new staf. Then there’s the technology. My Boomer brain just doesn’t seem to have the band width to remember all the changes.” 

That was just the start of my complaining. Mom just listened.

“Today, I was introducing myself to the kindergartners, and I stopped mid-sentence, because I realized that these kids were younger than my own grandchildren. How can my grand girls be older than my students?!” 

“I’m really feeling my age, Mom, and it’s kind of depressing.”

My mother replied with her usual wisdom, 

“Some of your frustration is work, and some of it is you. Teaching is a challenging job one which requires a lot of energy. Good thing your retirement is just two years away.” 

As I start my penultimate teaching year, I can’t help but feel old. I have been teaching elementary school for a quarter of a century. I have been on a fall-to-spring work schedule since I was five years old. When I do the math, I’m sort of dumb founded. My teaching career has served me well. It fills my days with many interesting exchanges with children. I never question whether I’m making a difference. All educators make a difference. I followed in my mother’s footsteps when I chose public school teaching as my career.

After raising five children in the 1960s and 70s, my mother went back to work. She was one of the first Early Childhood pre-school teachers in Cicero, Illinois. As she tells it,

“They (the administrators) didn’t know what to do with me. There was no formal program or classroom. So they put me in any extraclassroom the district had. Unfortunately, the classrooms were never equipped to house three- and four-year-olds with special needs. I built the program from scratch.” 

My mother is a tough lady. She almost always gets what she wants. I am sure she wrangled money out of her administrators and created a fine preschool program. 

“It was a joy to be with three-year-olds, even if they were nonverbal and had many needs,” my mother recalls. “At home there were five teenagers to contend with. The three-year-olds were a breeze.” 

My mother and father raised five children born between the years 1964 to 1971. I’m the eldest of four sisters and one brother, who now all have families of their own.

This is one little bit of my mother’s story. I’ve been interviewing her and collecting her stories for the last six months. Story telling is not a big part of my family of origin’s traditions; I’m not gaining huge insights into my mother’s life and my upbringing. I started this project thinking that by questioning my mother and waiting patiently while she reminisced, I would gain information and an understanding of my own life. Best-laid plans. My 84-year-old mother has become the unreliable narrator of her own life. She recounts half stories and is uncertain about specific facts. When I check with my siblings about some of the basics,

“Shell, where were you born? Mom insists that you were born in a hospital in LaGrange.”

 “My birth certificate states otherwise,” my sister replies. 

My mother will often get confused on dates and the timing of events in the timeline of her life. This, of course, worries my siblings and me. Maybe it is needless worry,  because Mom is living on her own, needing very little assistance from us. Maybe her rememberings are just a function of time and age.

My own grown children dispute many of my memories of their growing-up. One particular story of our three children’s shenanigans comes to mind: I clearly remember being in our basement, sewing. My fiber-arts studio was in the basement at the time, when I heard a horrendous PSSHHHHH of shattering glass. I ran up the stairs to find - 

“Mom, you weren’t even home when we broke your wine glasses. You and Dad were out at the time. The boys and I were fighting in the dining room and one of them whipped a tennis ball at me and I ducked. Then your glasses shattered,” says our 34-year-old daughter, swearing this version is true. 

How can her retelling be the correct story? I can hear the glass shattering. I can see me out of my mind screaming at our kids, 

“What were you doing?” I demanded. “Do you know how dangerous all of this broken glass is? All three of you are forfeiting your allowances until all of the wind glasses are replaced!”  There is no dispute between our off springs as to the accuracy of this part of the story. All of our children agree that this retribution did occur.

 Now, who is the unreliable narrator?

I came to writing five-ish years ago to recount my experience with my father’s illness and subsequent death. I did not realize in the fall of 2018 how difficult my writing journey would prove to be, and I had no idea what form the story would take. Turns out writing lyrics for the song, “Corners Of” allowed me to express deep-seated emotions with a minimal number of words. Maybe that conservation of emotion is what I needed to be able to express my story.

In The Creative Act: A Way of Being, author Rick Rubin describes art in this way.

“Art…speaks to all aspects of the human experience.”

“There are sides of ourselves that aren’t welcome in polite society, thoughts and feelings too dark to share. When we recognize them expressed in art, we feel less alone. This is the therapeutic power of making and consuming art.”

The lyrics of my songs are stories which connect me to a deeper understanding of life. The meanings or answers to questions which I wrestle with in my life. Maybe it doesn’t matter what facts are correct and which are embellished.

 As my husband likes to quote,

“Don’t let facts get in the way of a good story.”

 That is a version of a quote attributed to Mark Twain:

“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” 

What is truth? And, who tells it? My mother believes that my dad was only sick for about a year, when in reality it was more like five. He was bedridden for the last two years of his life and declining for two to three years before that. Maybe our human hearts and minds have to change the story to re-tell the difficult tales in our lives. Maybe our re-tellings will be more entertaining with embellishment. Maybe the necessary pain in re-telling trauma allows us to soften into our emotional distress. Often blurring the edges of the retelling allows us to just make it through. Or maybe our modern lives are just so full that it’s a challenge to remember everything.

Even though I have given the title of the unreliable narrator to my mother, it doesn’t diminish for me the tremendously full, ordinary life she leads. Raising, along with my father, five children, financing college for all of us, and giving us a loving and supportive home life on which to build our futures. Who cares how she tells her story? She loved us, and that was enough. In my father's last stage of life, my mother was his main caregiver. That role aged my mother tremendously. She chose to keep my father at home instead of in a memory-care facility, which I believe to be a selfless act of love. 

My mother’s wisdom still shines through. Though I question many things in my own life, believing that I am loved and was always loved by both of my parents grounded me to be able to love others. No matter what the facts are, love and gratitude shine through for me.