Held

At a trauma training, I heard a story of a little girl about six years old.  She was throwing blocks at preschool.  Nasty behavior.  She lobbed them intentionally and hard, at the wall, at a glass window, at other children.  In thinking about it, I felt angry at her.  Knock it off you little shit, you're going to break something or hurt someone.  I thought about dealing with that behavior at our co-op preschool and it dragged me down, made me feel tired and fed up.

Then, they played a tape. The same little girl at about eleven the night before the blocks flew on the phone with a 911 operator.  She sobbed hysterically. She screamed into the phone: He's hurting my mother! He's hurting my mother! He's hurting my mother he'shurtingmymotherhe'shurtingmymother.

The entire story changed.  I went from mild irritation to viscerally wanting to protect her and hold her anger close, to let her know that it was just fine.  You THROW those blocks, baby girl, right here, where it's safe. You throw them because I know you're pissed off and you're scared and you're confused and the people that are supposed to keep you safe are hurting each other.

I felt ashamed of my initial reaction.  I am, to put it kindly, an easily (if generally silently) irritated person.  Changing that takes work. Of course, I understand that adults can't go around hurling blocks at people's heads and chaulk it up to a shitty evening, but the lesson about knowing the whole story hit me hard in my aching, punching bag heart.

What I've learned (and forgotten and relearned and lapsed and learned anew) from motherhood and from blogging - from writing about motherhood and from reading the writings of others about motherhood is this:  The story changes everything. And every single person has a story.

We can't possibly know about the phone call.  The endless moments of before that led to right now.

I am changed (changing? trying to change?) by raising these little people because for them I want to be someone who understands and remembers the complexities of stories as I venture out into this world.  I want to be someone who, in the moment before judgment snaps the jaws of my mind closed, breathes and thinks, what about the phone call?

Our stories are important.  Our stories  - and yes, o evil and terrible commenters of the New York Times, I do mean all of us, even, gasp!, mothers - are everything.  They are pieces of us held up to the light and turned around. Even the darkest moments have a luminescent beauty because they are an integral part of the whole.  Of the who.  To be held in our story telling, to be seen and heard and still held safe and cherished by even one person who finds us beautiful because of who we are or because of what we reflect in them is something that we all crave.

Sitting at auditions for Listen To Your Mother in Spokane, Elise and I held twenty-one of those stories, fragile and strong and impossibly complex at once, in our inadequate hands. It was both shattering and fulfilling.  I heard pieces of strangers that they might not have shared with their closest friends. I heard pieces of friends that I didn't know existed.

It will be nearly impossible to choose between them and cast a show, but we will do it.  Because that will mean that on Mother's Day, we'll get to place those stories in three hundred more hands.  Every story heard matters. Hopefully, that's one more person that can't forget that we all have a story.  Every single one of us.

Huge hugs and thanks to the women that had the courage to read for us on Saturday.  I can only write about the day from my perspective, but they were the superstars.