Every family tells its stories – the funny anecdotes, the dramatic tales, the loving moments – the narrative of its collective past. For some reason, my family has a series of stories of how I almost died while in my mother’s care. I almost drowned when she abandoned me in the bath. While we were traveling in Europe, my baby carrier tumbled off the mantelpiece and I hit my head on the hearthstone. I fell down the basement stairs in our house onto the concrete floor. The most dramatic story, though, was when my mother left me to chase a groundhog. The groundhogs were decimating the garden, and my father declared war. The groundhogs were to be killed on sight. My father and brother went out, armed with baseball bats, to bash in their skulls (I suspect this was not a terribly successful strategy, but I do have a memory of a bloody baseball bat, so perhaps they got one, after all). One day, my mother was driving me home, and as she came to the top of the steep hill of our driveway, she saw a groundhog scampering across the lawn. She stopped the car and jumped out to get the groundhog. But she was in such a hurry, she failed to put on the emergency brake. As I sat in the car, bemused, it started rolling down the driveway toward the busy street below. I was young enough that I didn’t think to get out of the car. There I was, rolling toward an imminent car crash while my mother chased a groundhog, oblivious to my danger. She came back in time and stopped the car before it hit the street; I wasn’t hurt at all. But what I remembered about the story was my slow, solitary, backwards trek toward certain death, all because my mother chased a groundhog. And she didn’t even get the groundhog.
In retrospect, these stories seem to reveal a thread of maternal negligence, but I never thought of them that way. I told them as tales of danger to impress my friends. To me, these were exciting stories of my brushes with death and my inevitable ability to survive. I sometimes joked about my mother’s tendency to put me in danger as a child, but I never seriously thought of these as indicating bad mothering. It’s interesting, though, that these became family stories, and I wonder what they meant to the rest of my family.
Me, in front of the garden that we were protecting from groundhogs (Piscataway, NJ, 1969)
2 comments:
I am curious about who the tellers might be? Especially for the things you don't recall yourself. Not that I want or need you to tell me - just something to think about. I can imagine your mother as having her "brain full" and just not realizing she was making a poor choice as well.
My father and mother tell some amazing tales about one another's families. Most of them, though they THINK they are true, are complete fabrications. I don't know where they came from, or how they each came to believe they were telling the truth. But I know that few of these stories were around BEFORE they split up. These stories are generally not malicious, so it's...odd.
You are right that the family stories may be inaccurate or even entirely fabricated -- that's why I was careful to label these as stories, not direct memories. I have a vivid "memory" of the scene in the car, but I know this is just a reconstruction based on the family story, not a first-hand memory. I have no idea whether it really happened that way.
I'm not sure who the tellers were -- I certainly told these stories myself, as I got older, and I assume I heard them from my parents (although I don't have any specific memories of the telling). I do wonder what these stories meant to others in my family (including my mother). I always liked them as signifying my survivability, but perhaps others took a different meaning.
I'm curious about the stories in your family -- I'll have to ask you about them sometime! ;)
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