You Don't have to be a Writer to Write Your Stories

My daughter Amy was three years old when she announced that she planned to become a cop… and a robber when she grew up.

I was babysitting another three-year-old named Kurt at the time. Both of his parents were dentists, and one day I asked him if he was going to be a dentist when he grew up.

“Well,” he said, “I think I’m going to be a dentist and a fireman.”

I looked over at Amy. She was giving this some serious thought. You could almost see the possibilities rolling around in that little three-year-old brain.

“What about you, Amy? What are you going to be when you grow up?”

She thought for another moment.

“Ahhh…I think I’m going to be a cop and a robber.”

That was more than forty years ago, and I can still see her little face.

I don’t remember what we had for dinner that night. I don’t remember what I was worried about that week, what bills needed paying, or what was on television. Most of that year has disappeared from my memory.

But I remember the cop and the robber.

And I want her to remember it too.

I want her grandchildren to know that their grandmother once sat very seriously considering her future and decided there was no reason she couldn’t pursue careers on both sides of the law.

That, I’m realizing, is one of the reasons I write my stories. I don’t want them to disappear.

I think about stories from my grandparents and parents. Stories from growing up in an Arizona cowboy family. Grandpa’s favorite fishing stories. Grandma coming to my rescue on the ranch when I screamed. Stories involving horses, cows, rattlesnakes, and some very strong women. I heard some of those stories over and over growing up.

I probably rolled my eyes at a few of them.

Now I wish I had more.

Because when the people who remember a story are gone, something else disappears with them. A little piece of a family. A glimpse of who someone was before we knew them. The funny things. The hard things. The mistakes. The stories everybody used to tell around the dinner table until, eventually, there was nobody left who remembered exactly how they went.

I've been writing more personal stories the past ten years than I ever have before. Some are about the experiences we immediately recognize as important. Death. Divorce. Addiction. Motherhood. Starting over. Things that broke my heart and things that changed me.

Those stories truly matter to me because this is who I am. This is the life I lived. I want my children and grandchildren to know more about me than the roles I occupied in their lives. I was their mother and grandmother, but I was also a little girl on a ranch, a young woman trying to figure herself out, a wife, a teacher, a school administrator, a woman who screwed things up, survived some difficult things, changed her mind about plenty, and kept learning.

I was here.

But I'm discovering that the stories I most want to preserve aren't always the big ones.

Many years ago, when my kids’ dad and I were young and struggling financially, we went to one of his work conferences in Laughlin, Nevada. It was one of the first times we'd gotten away without the kids in a very long time, and the conference included free food and free drinks.

Free was a very important word to us in those days.

We took full advantage, especially of the drinks. We eventually stumbled back toward our hotel, picked up burgers and went to our room, where I promptly fell asleep.

Sometime later, I woke to someone pounding on our hotel room door. In my drunken stupor, I kept telling my husband, “Don’t answer it! Don’t answer it!”

There was a very good reason someone was pounding on our door.

That’s another story.

For decades, I thought of that night as nothing more than one of those crazy things we did when we were young. Now I see the rest of it too. We were young parents. Money was tight. Time alone was rare. Somebody offered us free booze, and we temporarily forgot every lesson we'd ever learned about moderation.

I want to remember those people too.

Maybe that's what I've come to understand about writing our stories. We aren't only recording what happened. We are preserving versions of ourselves.

And some of our stories may eventually matter to people we've never met.

I write about addiction because someone loving an addicted person may recognize herself in my experience and feel a little less alone. I write about grief because people my age are losing people we love, and there are things about grief that are hard to understand until you've lived them. I write about getting older because my generation grew up with particular messages about women, marriage, motherhood, success, secrecy, strength, and what we were supposed to endure. Other generations will have their own stories.

Ours deserve to be told too.

And so do the funny ones.

So does the kitten who wandered into our lives after a palm tree grove burned and we were evacuated from our home. So does the day I fell into our backyard pool and, for a few terrifying seconds, thought I might die. So does the morning Lou and I came across two rabbits who seemed to be having a jumping contest. One jumped straight into the air, then the other, and I stood there completely enthralled instead of reaching for my phone to take a photo.

Writing stories has changed the way I look at moments like that.

I pay more attention now.

I wonder why I remember something. I wonder what was happening underneath it. I wonder what it tells me about who I was then or who I am now. And sometimes I simply think, that was funny as hell. I want to remember it.

That's enough.

So forget about being a “writer” for a minute.

Tell me about your grandmother's kitchen. Tell me the story Grandpa told so many times everybody could recite it with him. Tell me what your child said at three that still makes you laugh at sixty-eight. Tell me about your first heartbreak, the dog you loved, the Christmas that went completely off the rails, the stupid thing you did at twenty-three.

Write it the way you'd tell it to someone sitting across the table from you.

The grammar can wait. And if writing just isn’t your thing, speak it into your phone’s recording device.

Because someday there may be a granddaughter who would give almost anything to hear Grandpa tell that fishing story one more time.

Or a grown daughter who has forgotten that she once planned to become both a cop and a robber. Or a son whose dream it was to become a bus driver.

These little stories are part of how we know one another. They're part of how our families know where they came from and how other human beings discover that somebody else has been frightened, foolish, heartbroken, joyful or completely confused in some of the same ways they have.

They say something very simple.

This happened. This was us. I was here.

And if two rabbits happen to start a jumping contest while you're out walking, for goodness sake, pay attention.

You may want that story someday.

Love is ALL there is.

Diana