Our Lives are Made of
Stories
I was born a wild
child—raised in combination by a working mother, an older sister and a
step-mother who, for three months out of the year, tried to tame the wildness
though long games of scrabble and lessons in kneading dough.
But circumstance and
events proved greater than double letter values and the smell of blossoming
yeast. Each year the wildness grew stronger, the risks greater, the
recklessness so outrageous that now I
look back in wonder that I ever escaped the self-fulfilling prophecy of my youth.
When I was 15 I fell in
love with a boy from a large Catholic family. His mother welcomed me into their
home—a home over filled with furniture and knick-knacks and photos, and most of
all, family.
On the wall in their
living room were seven eight-by-ten portraits.
She pointed them out
the first day we met, her fingers trailing along each of their faces, pausing
at the lips of a child who had died too young.
I did not know then,
but I know now that in the time it took for teenage love to spark and blaze and
ultimately flame out,
She taught me that my
wildness was not about rebellion or defiance, it was about need, the need to be
connected to something greater than myself.
My step-mother once
said that the person we become is shaped by our ever accumulating stories—the good ones, the bad ones, the right and the
wrong—and by all the people who care enough to make us part of their own tales.
If that is true then
the person I am now has been shaped by stories I will never tell, by a woman
determined to provide for her children,
by sibling love
fiercely loyal and protective,
by long summer nights
of 7-letter-words,
and by the memory of a
mother's longing and pride mirrored in a portrait 15 years old.
Now I have my own
portraits on a wall,
and the need that drove
my wildness has evolved into the need to help the children who come into my life—
children who have yet to recognize their own needs.
When they ask me, “Mrs. Miller, what
were you like as a child?”
I laugh and answer, “Me? I was just like you. I was born a wild child.”
Of course they don’t believe me.
But oh, the stories I could tell.
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