My stories

My mother has always been the storyteller in our family. Growing up, there were certain ones that became canon: the time she knew she needed to go to the nearest clinic because she was about to give birth or when she almost had a heart attack but by some miracle she ended up having open heart bypass surgery instead. And when I was a teenager, my mom was one of the first people from El Salvador who went to China, when China was starting to open its borders to tourists. Or when she started working for Casa Flores where she met my father. Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about that particular tale. What if my mom had decided to find work somewhere else? 

 

It’s also not just about sharing the happy parts of our lives. Especially now, as the world enters the third year of the pandemic, we need to be willing to open up about painful memories, because it shows our children that they are not alone in going through something hard. The knowledge that their relatives and ancestors also had difficult times — wars, depressions, natural disasters — and made it through them can give children confidence.

 

Parents who share stories about their childhood give children the knowledge that they are part of something bigger, and children who know more family stories may grow up with higher self-esteem and suffer less from depression and anxiety according to studies done on the subject. It can even help heal families who have faced trauma. But like any other skill, family storytelling is a muscle that needs to be built. 

 

Children learn to tell their stories by listening to how their parents, grandparents and older relatives tell theirs. Whenever there are moments of contact with family members — dinners, gatherings, car trips — those are opportunities for storytelling. Create moments in which storytelling is possible. It doesn’t happen in the midst of a busy day or when everyone’s scrolling through social media on their phones. I love to tell stories because stories are a way of preserving family history but more importantly -- this is the thing we often forget--they create resilience and a sense of continuity.  Telling family stories is powerful, but not always in the way you think, they build a framework to understand painful experiences and celebrate joyful ones. It requires some effort, perhaps even a family ritual and that is what I have become more passionate about lately. 

con amor,

Vero