Three Sons, Three Storytellers

Preserving Family Stories

We dropped Sam off in California last week to begin his life in film.

His apartment is nice, bigger than I expected, actually. The cleanliness was exactly what you would expect from a place where college kids live, so I pulled out the Scrubbing Bubbles and rubber gloves and got to work. Apparently, that is how I show love in a crisis.

Before I left, I was completely choked up. Thankfully, I had thought ahead and written Sam a letter with everything I wanted him to know, because there was no way I could say it all out loud.

I tried. Instead, I sobbed in the Uber while the driver kept glancing at me in the rearview mirror, clearly unsure whether to offer me a tissue or pretend none of this was happening.

Sam texted me later and told me the letter meant a lot to him. It has had me thinking ever since about how words from the heart sometimes hit differently when they are written down. Maybe it is because they feel more permanent. You can hold a letter. You can tuck it away and read it again on a hard day.

And because Sam is a writer too, I knew it wouldn’t disappear into a drawer somewhere. He would keep it. He might even read it again.

It has only been a few days since Sunday, and I am still sitting in all the emotions. But one thought keeps circling back to me:

All three of my boys care about our family’s story.

Every single one of them.

They just carry it in completely different ways.

Watching the ways they are each preserving family stories has been one of the unexpected gifts of letting go of this one.

Three Different Ways of Preserving Family Stories

Alex is the keeper.

And I don’t mean that as a small thing. The man has an entire drawer filled with random objects from every phase of his childhood, and he will not part with a single one. It has become a running joke in our family. Whenever something goes missing, we wonder out loud whether it ended up in Alex’s drawer, where it will now be kept for all eternity.

He holds on to the things that prove a moment happened.

Nick is the rememberer.

Ask him about something the three of them did as kids, and he will hand the memory back to you whole—the exact joke, the exact summer and the exact way it happened. I love hearing him remind us of things I had half forgotten because he doesn’t just remember the facts. He remembers the feeling of it.

And Sam is the storyteller.

He always has been.

When he was about ten, during a family trip to Greece, he wrote his first “manuscript.” His word, not mine. He called it that completely seriously at ten years old.

He wrote it in a notebook from school with dogs on the cover. I will never forget how serious his face was when he pulled it out on the plane, and then again each night at the Airbnb, adding a few more pages before bed.

Now he is going to build entire worlds from that same instinct, putting stories on a screen for people he may never meet. It is not so different from what I do when I sit down to write our family into a book. His stories are simply pointed in a different direction.

A keeper. A rememberer. A storyteller.

Maybe this is what preserving family stories looks like in our family, not one person doing it all, but each of us holding on in our own way.

I never consciously taught my boys to care about our story this way. I never sat them down and said, “This is how we hold on to what matters.”

They just do it, each in his own language.

I don’t think I ever imagined that my love of family, tradition and history would be passed down like this…quietly, without me ever teaching a lesson about it.

I have a feeling I am not the only mother who has seen this happen. I bet you have passed something down to your children without realizing it, too. Something you never deliberately taught them but can now see took root anyway.

That is such a strange and specific kind of blessing.

It is also one of the reasons I care so much about helping other families capture the memories and stories that might otherwise be lost. Hope Story Academy is a resource if you want to become the memory keeper, the storyteller, of your family.

Right now, I am mostly melancholy. I am proud of Sam and so happy to watch him chase this dream. I am also sad, and I miss him already. FaceTime means I still get to see his face instead of only hearing his voice, which helps more than I expected.

And now, I am waiting to see what he writes next.

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