Oregano and Cargo Planes - why telling stories of the past matters

Recently my sister Kait sent around a group text to me, my mom, and my other two sisters: "Making sauce. Can never do it without singing 'oregano' as I add it to the pot." A flurry of responses came. Apparently, everyone but me remembered the way our maternal grandmother sang the oregano into her pot of sauce. "The secret ingredient," she called it.

"Sing it for me," I asked my mom the next time we visited my parents in NH. She did. And it all came back. There I was standing in my grandmother's tiny galley kitchen over her well-seasoned cast iron pots sizzling with pork chops and bubbling with olive oil, garlic, tomatoes, basil, and of course "oregano!"

Our Italian grandmother, Mama Katy, stood just five feet tall. She had delicate features--high cheekbones and  a head of tight silver curls that she kept short for practicality's sake. She grew up in Brooklyn, the second daughter of Italian immigrants. She loved gardening, cooking, dancing, singing, and her family. When she passed away in 2005 at 80, we missed her terribly. Since then, we've kept her stories, her recipes, and her quirky habits alive in our own families, so much so that my oldest daughter who bears her and my mom's name said, "I feel like I've always known her, Mom, even though we never met."

"Mama Katy would have loved you guys," I always tell my three littles.
"Your grandmother was a strong woman," my paternal grandmother has said to me before, who is herself one of the most resilient women I know.
"Remember how?" we often begin a story.
"This is for Mama Katy," my second daughter often declares triumphantly as she licks the last of her dessert from her plate. She's referring to a story I told her about how my grandmother loved strawberry shortcake so much, she once licked her dessert plate clean when she thought no one was looking. And even though we live in different states, my three sisters and I still celebrate June 21--the first day of summer and Mama Katy's birthday--with homemade strawberry shortcake. If Instagram and texting had been a thing when Mama Katy was alive, she would have been right there with us, taking pictures of food and sending them around to the family.

We inherited many things from our maternal grandmother, not the least of which is a fierce commitment to each other. She always told us the hard stories about growing up in Brooklyn during the Depression, along with the funny ones about her and her four entrepreneurial siblings, and the loving ones--about what made her proud of her children and grandchildren.

All families have stories of the past they enjoy telling and retelling. And research shows that passing down a rich narrative family history to our kids is essential to their growth and resilience. When kids can contextualize their own lives in a narrative larger than their own experiences, they're more likely to thrive themselves, even when life deals them difficult circumstances.

I don't know if Mama Katy knew this; she just loved a good (often embellished) story. In sharing her stories she passed on more than a catalog of traditions and family history to us. Her childhood was not a Hollywood movie. It was tough, marked by trauma, but also full of love and good food and of course, story. Kids who have a strong sense of their families' past and the ups and downs their ancestors endured across the generations benefit by gaining a broad view of life. They learn to see themselves as characters in their own story that is also part of a history much bigger than themselves.

That's why last summer when Mark and I flew down to Florida with the kids to visit Nana, my paternal grandmother, we asked her again about what it was like to be the daughter of German immigrants, growing up in New York City. She told us about how hard she and her parents worked in their family business--a bakery--and at Saks Fifth Avenue where her mother sewed dresses for wealthy women. Nana's first job was at the Rockefeller building, just across the street from Saks where her mother was a seamstress. She worked for Exon Mobil during the early oil boom. Once, before the advent of commercial airlines, she took a fourteen-hour flight on a cargo plane from Europe to Nova Scotia, just to get back from visiting family in Germany to her job waiting in New York. "It was crazy," she said. "I was young and didn't think about the dangers at the time, but the ride was awful. There were no seats to speak of or bathrooms, and it was bumpy. But I needed to get home and my mother wanted to stay in Germany longer." These are stories I want to remember, the ones that will get retold and embellished as part of the fabric of our family's past.

Recently my son did a family history project in his second grade class and took a page from his great, great grandmother Anna's autobiography to school. It told about surviving the first world war in Germany only to realize that with a crushed economy, there was no future for her beyond marriage or a life working on her family's farm. When an aunt who had already immigrated to the United States offered to sponsor her, she jumped at the opportunity to come to the U.S. Eighteen years old and penniless, she left her mother and father and nine siblings to make a new life in a foreign land. She worked first as a housemaid and then at the counter of a delicatessen. Though she and my great grandfather grew up just one town away from each other in rural Northwestern Germany, they didn't meet until they were both living in New York. Eventually, she and Henry built
a successful business of their own.

The heroes in my kids' lives aren't comic book and cartoon characters (which have their magical, necessary place in childhood, of course); they're flesh and blood relatives whose pictures and stories and artifacts live alongside our present day experiences. When our kids face struggles in their own lives, I want them to see those struggles as part of something larger--a story that says we are family, we do life together, we persevere, and we carry on.

This past Tuesday, while I was still drafting this post, my Nana experienced a stroke. When we got the phone call from my dad Tuesday night, the kids and I were planting seeds in trays in the sun room, dreaming of our garden and summer. He told me in a somber voice that we should prepare for the fact that Nana would likely pass away soon. Hospice had been called in. I hung up and broke the news to my littles. One shed her own tears. Another found a quiet place to think, and the littlest offered up advice for how the doctors should help Nana. "Tell Aunt Gail, she need a grink [drink] water," he mumbled as he drifted off to sleep that night. They all tried to make sense of losing someone close to them for the first time. The girls and I stayed up extra late sharing stories about Nana, what we love about her, how strong she is, and how we were glad we had finished planting our seeds even after we got the upsetting phone call, because she never wants anyone to fuss over her and she would have told us to finish what we had started.

And then a miracle. Just twenty-four hours later, my Nana was sitting up in bed, talking (with effort), and remembered who and where she was. She just celebrated her 90th birthday two weeks ago, and though that was a special day, the last three days have been nothing short of remarkable. Once again, without knowing she really has, she taught us about the importance of resilience, about the strength that is part of who we are as a family. This was not lost on my children.

And so our stories matter, most especially the ones we tell each other and then pass down to our children. Even the simplest tales help our kids establish a sense of identity rooted in the past and pointed toward a future. And it is in the telling that we ourselves become characters in a narrative that began generations before us and will hopefully carry on for generations after.