Approaching the Seam: a meditation on storytelling

What does it mean to say "story is a verb?" 

It means that a story is not just a product, artifact, or thing. 

Story is a process, a part of our living, our becoming, our breath. 

Story is a moment in time, experienced by each person differently, based on our remembered pasts and imagined futures. 

When we enter the world of story as a verb, we see how each of our remembered stories is a distillation of many different memories: our own and other people's. 

There may be stories we've told – or been told – so often they become frozen and fixed. I call those scripts, not stories. 

The seam is the place where we open up scripts – our own, our family's, and other people's – and explore them as fluid and mutable; as stories. At the seam, each person's scripts – the things we tell ourselves habitually – dissolve into the wonder and complexity of specific moments of experience, lived differently by each person. 

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The seam is a place of dancing and laughter, tears and letting go of tears. It's a place where you can 

• let in information you didn't see at the time

• listen to other people's words 

• reshape your relationship with the past 

• reimagine your future

• accept things exactly as they are

and let all of it go into the infinite complexity of time. 

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For me, the month between the middle of January and the middle of February is a seam. 

In a span of three weeks are the day my parents' married in 1954, the day they started their own business in 1960, the day my father died 1975, the day my stepfather died in 1989, and the day my mother almost died in 2018. 

This year, I tried something different: energy whirling through my body, I approached that seam. I paused to watch where my thoughts were tumbling, and as I slowed down, I saw how all of these separate memories had become a composite of pain and loss. 

I went back to when my father was alive, watching myself and my family. It's a Sunday morning, and my mother has a headache. When I tried to talk to her at the kitchen table she shooed me away. Did this happen once, or many times? It's impossible to know. But that feeling of being the cause of my mother's Sunday sadness left a trace. 

My parents worked ridiculously hard, from before I woke up till after I was asleep at night. Their first office was in the basement of our house, right below the kitchen. My mom chain smoked at her desk, facing the stairs, and she had very strict rules about how my sister and I were to behave when we came downstairs. No whining, no crying, no stomping. 

We were told to act “like adults,” though we were just seven and five years old when my parents moved their business out of the basement into an office building downtown. 

My father ran the outside parts of the business, and my mother ran the inside parts. So she was there, but not there, in the basement, working. And when she came upstairs, I remember my mother yelling at me, and me yelling back. It felt like she was always trying to fix and change me; like nothing I did was ever good enough.

My father would come home from a long day selling, and he would calm us both. I remember sitting on the living room couch, my father listening to my wildest ideas as if I could make them come true. When he read with me or looked over my schoolwork, I felt safe. Most of all, he conveyed a sense that I was amazing just the way I was, and that everything I wasn't yet I could be one day if I just worked really hard and was kind to other people. 

When I was in third grade, my parents bought an office downtown, and their advertising and billboard business really took off. 

And then, when I was in ninth grade, cancer entered our house and stayed until my father died. We lost him slowly, as the cancer took over one organ at a time. But it was also as if he became more and more himself as his body could do less and less. I had no concept of the world without him. Even in the last week of his life, when he tried so hard to explain to me that he would not be there when I went to college, got married, had children of my own. 

"I may not be there…" he said, looking out the living room window. "No, no Daddy, you'll get better. I'll take care of you." After two years in and out of the hospital, in the days before hospice, my father came home to die. My mother was working incessantly to keep the business running. The nurse who was taking care of my father at home called in with a migraine the week he died. I skipped lunch period on Wednesday and came home to feed him; on Friday, I left school right after my last class – English – and sat with him until he asked me to walk him back to bed. 

And then on Saturday morning, my sister found him on the bedroom floor. I called the neighbors, the ambulance, and then my mom. It was 5:54 in the morning, and she was already at work. 

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In 2017 my mom asked me to help her write her story. I'd helped two other women CEOs tell their stories, but my mom and I had fought so much over so many years, especially when I'd worked with her and my sister in that business, and when I left. 

At first, I pretended she was a batty old feminist I'd met at a party, not my mom. Whenever we got to the painful bits, I asked questions to tease out her side of the story. I remembered my father saying, late at night over a bowl of cereal, "You need to be the bigger person, Carol. I know it's not fair, but you can see things she cannot see." 

I saw that she was only 39 when my father got sick, and 41 when he died. She had already lost her father to diabetes, her brother to the war, and her brilliant older sister to depression and suicide. My mother ran hard to avoid all those early losses; she’s ninety now, and in her mind she still runs hard many days. 

Recently, she said, "I was harsh," that one word shorthand for so many things.

"It's okay mom," I held her soft hand, "you did the best you could at the time. We all did." 

That is the work of the seam. My father is there, urging me to look at the world from multiple points of view. That was my father's gift: he saw other people as big and himself as small. When I beamed that gift on my mother in 2017, a lifetime of fighting dissipated and blew away. 

And after we finished her book, the same week my father had died, my mother got a horrible flu and almost died herself. I sat holding her hand in the hospital. "Carol, is that you" she said and then opened her eyes. I stayed with her for ten days, until she could begin to take care of herself. 

Our lives unfold, experiences pile on one another, and our stories are formed. The stories that define us often get hardened and fixed. But we can go back into them and explore what happened: who else was there, what they said, what we thought and felt at the time. 

That is the work of the seam: laughter, memory, forgiveness, love. 

At the seam, our memories are a fabric we can weave and reweave in the present. Each thread is connected to all the others, so as we hold it up to the light and observe from many directions, we see how things we understood in a limited way as children came to inform our thoughts and emotions over time. And we see how things we habitually think and feel can be teased out and released.

This work at the seam requires a large dose of forgiveness – for myself and everyone else. As much as I can forgive, I can release, breathe, begin to untangle the threads of the past that choked me and held me back. 

I invite you to try this, gently and slowly and with great love for yourself, with a memory that limits you and holds you back in some way. When you approach the seam, let the story unfold in all its complexity, you are here and watching, and you are safe.