I just finished watching the final episode of this season of Finding Your Roots. I love this show. It confirms what I have always believed. It is not enough to know just the names of your ancestor’s. It is more fun and meaningful to know the story of your ancestors and this is why Memoir writing is important to me.
When I was a young wife and mother-to-be I began to recognize how the impact of moving to Pennsylvania from Illinois would have on my children and their ability to know me through my own upbringing. My husband’s family had already demonstrated to me that get-togethers were full of stories of past memories, filled with laughter and lots of love. I recognized also at the time, that although I was running from my own childhood memories, I did turn out okay and there had to be a reason for that too, so while pregnant with my first child, I decided to collect the stories of my family and so began a life-long journey of learning through stories shared of who my family were.
It was the best gift I could have ever given to myself. In asking questions of my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins, I learned that all that I perceived through life was not as it was felt and, in the end, it became a healing experience. For in searching for the stories of who my family were and how they lived I learned that what I was feeling from them had to do more with their own experiences than what I had done to experience a negative moment from them.
I have watched time and again the celebrities express a longing about why their own parents had not shared this or that piece of family history only to discover they may have suppressed the information to hide from their own pain. Once the story is revealed to them the level of understanding that sweeps over them often fills them with a strong emotional reaction.
All of us have a story to tell. Decisions we make can leave a lasting impact on those we love for generations that follow. When the truth behind those decisions is revealed it can change the impact left on those left to deal with the outcome of those decisions.
Funny…how we keep things close to the heart on the pretense we don’t want to hurt anyone, but the truth is we are just unable to deal with the pain of some of that reality ourselves leaving the generations that follow to puzzle the why of things.
As I watched Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow in this last episode all I could think was how the truth can set you free.
