We Live the Stories We Tell
E125: ABCs of Storytelling Part 2. Guest Essay by Dekera Greene Rodriguez
Dateline: Goa, India
“We’d finally arrive at the house just as the sun was setting. Exhausted, we’d sit in a circle on the beach eating fresh puris dipped into delicious xacuti , drinking tender coconuts. I’ll never forget that taste!”
We’d finally got Mum down to the water’s edge. She stood — a little shaky — as the warm waves lapped at her ankles, staring out to the horizon and the beautiful setting sun. Her feet were rooted in the soft sand of the present. While her memories hopped back eight decades. “In those days, the beach was empty. And I remember it going on for ever,” she recalled as her mature self looks back on her memoriesas a seven-year-old.
This story of my mother’s childhood summer holidays has to be among my favourite of all the tales she tells. Maybe it is because of the way her eyes light up. Maybe because it’s a travel tale, and her telling takes almost as long as the actual journey. Maybe it is because it is my connection back to the generosity and caring of yet another great-grandmother.
Her eyes lit up the minute we cross the bridge over the Siolim River. “We would cross this river by ferry,” she told my boys sitting in the back seat of the taxi. “It would take us a full day to reach my Avo’s house in the North, from the South,” she said. “From there, we had yet another journey”, she said, recalling those beach visits.
“The day would dawn, and I’d be so excited. First, we’d take one bus to Mapuça (the local market town). And from there another into Siolim where we would cross the river by ferry. Half the day was now done. But it was here that our real journey would begin. Because there would be a bullock cart waiting for us and our luggage. It would take us four and a half hours to cross the hills and plains from Siolim down to the Arabian Sea and the beach at Mandrem. We would take it in turns to ride in the cart, and to walk - our short stubby legs keeping pace with the languid speed of the bullocks yoked together.
“That is why that curry was so tasty! We were just plum exhausted. And starving.” She finished while sharing a plate of xacuti with her grandsons who had cajoled their grandmother into joining them on this beach of her childhood.
“And have I told you about the time my uncles got a telling off from my Avo because they took me with them by canoe on the creek from the house down to the point where the water meets the raging currents of the Arabian Sea?” … she continues, as the memories start tumbling back.
I'm grateful beyond measure:
For this moment between my mother and children, learning slow travel and how summer vacations for so many across the globe is no more than the opportunity to visit Grandma.
That my mother can share the beach of her youth with her grand kids. Busier, yet clean and serene, walking 1/8 mile at low tide. This "gift" of a beach to Goans and tourists is because prior generations' were stewards for the space. Given the rising sea waters, will I be able to share forward this beach and the stories of my mother and her Avo with my grandchildren?
My mother's memory, vivid enough to share such details with her grandkids. Her muscles may be challenged by Parkinson’s but her mind remains sharp.
Allow me to introduce you to
Her
me of walking into my grandmother’s kitchen, where the singsong chatter of aunts and cousins around the table creates harmonics with the steady knife chopping vegetables and the curry bubbling on the stove. I wanted to share her special way of story telling with you. She meanders through the telling, her storytelling style so reminiscent of my mother’s.I found this essay particularly powerful. In it, I hear the power of a parent to shape the path forward for their child. I also hear the opportunity for a child to re-write their own expectations. Then, wearing my Future of Work hat, I see the agency that story telling offers us in seguing into a new era.
As ChatGPT takes over our headlines, I thought this essay partners well with last week’s invitation to explore new possibilities, reminding us that story-telling is a powerful heirloom skills.
Reclaiming Our Story
Author: Dekera Greene Rodriguez
Newsletter: Black Narrative Newsletter
Excerpt from ‘Reclaiming Our Story’
I reflected on my own mother, the mothers before her and their stories, and I found the bridge to becoming through reclamation of my story. Changing my story changed my world.
My world is shifting because of the stories I tell myself and those around me. My life and time have expanded greatly. The stories I told myself, my husband, and my children had to change in order for me to add more time back to my life; and to give myself space to pursue what engages me most. I've been able to get my time and story back, and in a house full of six kids this is no small feat.
This shift has had a profound impact on life now. I've told them (and myself) that they are far more capable than I've been giving them credit for. They must try first, seek help from each other, try again, try again, try again, and then they can consult me. We live the stories that we tell. In order to create a life with more meaning and impact, we must tell different stories.
My story of reclamation is an opportunity made possible by my mother and the mothers before me. She toiled, and told herself that her daughter would not have to in that way, as a result I’m the first generation in my family that didn’t work on a white farm–not in slavery, share-cropping, or Black child labor. Her choice reminded me that nothing is in my way that I don’t put in it. I made a choice to reclaim my time and story which served as a nudging awareness to myself that I was the one who decided to deny myself space and that my happiness and intentionality could only grow when I was actively shaping my own identity. I almost forgot and lost myself in false pressures and contrived measurements.
Now and perhaps always, our world serves as a reflection of our inner lives - elastic, dynamic and constantly changing. The shift we’ve experienced from manufacturing/industry/agricultural labor to knowledge, technology and service work is a result of storytelling. We’ve told ourselves this should (1) be possible (2) go faster, (3) be more efficient, etc. and have worked to make it happen. The truth of our macro-lives has often forced us to adopt it in our micro-lives. Shedding that skin is the beginning of story reclamation.
When we change the stories we tell, we create an identity shift. In my case, I went from busy, busy, too-busy mother-martyr to a curious, imaginative person seeking and chasing serendipity and possibility in herself and those around her. When I find myself falling into old habits and ways, I push back. The boundaries I established with my story reclamation disables the old, worn story of self-sacrifice. The life I choose is one where I actively live and inhabit who I want to become.
I reflected on my own mother, the mothers before her and their stories, and I found the bridge to becoming through reclamation of my story. Changing my story changed my world. Storytelling solves problems. It saves, transforms, and restores.
Take a trip back through time. Read Dekera’s full story here, then discover the breadth of this woman who is equal parts strong mother and professional presence. Then subscribe to her newsletter:
I am grateful that through the centuries, from grandmother to grandchild, from mother to daughter, storytelling has remained ABC - an Always Backwards Compatible technology.
In Other News:
This journey to India will soon be ending. I hoped to meet so many people in person, but my schedule has not permitted that. Please do, however, reach out and do a zoom call.
- was my mentor in my first Write of Passage cohort. I’ve been following his work ever since. I’m proud to see that he has published his beautifully self-illustrated book Wandering Spirits . It is a book of modern-day fables to read by yourself, or share with your children. Fables are some of the first forms of story through which we learn verbal metaphor, and how we can have agency within our world. Buy it and pass along the joy and discovery of storytelling to someone young.
My apologies to all those who caught a glimpse of my BTS (Behind The Scenes) editing technique for this edition. I was caught napping at my keyboard and inadvertently hit “publish” on a thought still in progress. Thank you to those who still supported and commented! I hope you like the photo that accompanies this edition.
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Stay healthy. From there all else becomes possible. Treat your health as the precious resource it is.
Karena
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Why are our mothers' stories somehow more interesting than ours? I always feel this nostalgia for a time I never experienced, nor, a place I've ever seen, and I felt this here. Thank you for sharing your mother's stories and memories.
Karena - I loved seeing it twice!! Dekera is worthy of that!