Narrators.

These days I find myself thinking more and more about Erma Bombeck.

Erma Bombeck had a daily column in my hometown newspaper when I was a child.  (I didn't know when I first started reading her that the columns were syndicated to appear all over the country; the readers of the Dayton papers knew she was local).  I loved reading the newspaper; comics first, of course, but also advice columns and weird-little-fact-of-the-day columns and humor columns.  And I loved reading Erma Bombeck.  She was funny, even if I did not always understand the humor, and touching, and I recognized a skilled practioner of the writer's craft even then.

And there was another side to it.  She wrote a "housewife's column:"  she wrote about raising a family, finding humor and ridiculousness and occasionally profundity in the ordinary mother's life.  I was not a homemaker; I was, what, eleven or twelve?  But I lived in a home.  I had a mother.   And when I read about children from her perspective, sometimes I didn't understand what was so funny about it (for example, she wrote a tongue-in-cheek instruction manual for after her death, including careful instructions on how to change a toilet paper roll and wipe toothpaste out of a sink, which I took as utterly serious when I first read it and didn't realize until I was an older teenager that it was satirical).  Nevertheless some of it sank in and I could see myself, as a child, and the ordinary childish things I did.  It was a little mortifying, but eye-opening in an important way.  I think it helped me see my own mother as a more complete human being than I might have otherwise.  And I remembered those things years later when I became a mother, myself, and again when I lost my own mother.

If you've never encountered Erma Bombeck, I suggest starting with her 1971 collection If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?  I haven't read it in many years, and maybe it's super dated by now, but in any case you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about.

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I am always saying that I think the first so-called mommyblogger (let's retire that term, though) was Erma.  I would like to go back in time and ask Erma what it was like, to write about home and family, to write humorously about home and family, prolifically so (thousands of columns over many years) and still to guard the hearts of the individuals she lived with and loved.  How did she do it?  Was she always successful?  Did her kids go off to college uneasily wondering if their professors would ask when they learned to change a toilet paper roll?  And what about the griefs and the struggles small and large?  How much did she write about those?  How much did she keep in?  Was she ever bursting with stories she wanted to tell because they were her stories but in the end could not, because they were not ONLY her stories, but also someone else's?

Stories about relationships never belong to only one person.

Even stories about the briefest of encounters never belong to only one person.  

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And it's hard to understand what to do with them.  I mean, everyone whom the stories belong to has something to grapple with. 

One of the key things to realize is that we are the main character in some stories and simultaneously a supporting character, or even an antagonist, in others.  And there's no absolute right story, either; God may have the God's-eye view, but good luck obtaining the transcript.

Being the supporting character in someone else's story doesn't negate my own version.  It doesn't remove my need to tell it, or my right to tell it... but respect for the existence of all those other versions sure calls into question the wisdom of telling it, or setting it out in public.

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All this is to say that one of the great hardships of loving someone, having a close family member who is having a really, really hard time...

...and yes, I love someone, I have a family member, who is having a really, really hard time... many of us do.... and it is hard, it is...

...is the knowledge that the experience is not only your own and it would be an injustice to preserve your own point of view as the sole, Authorized Version.

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I almost wrote, "No matter how hard it is for you personally,  it isn't your story to tell."

But that's not true.  There is a story that is mine to tell if I wish or keep back if I deem it wise... but wisdom and respect for the fullness of other human beings' internal lives, at least the shreds of wisdom I've managed to claw together in forty-seven years, tell me that you can't have everything.  You voluntarily set some things aside because you value other things more. 

And one of the things you sometimes waive is the right to tell your own story, at least widely.

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Being the supporting character in someone else's story, though?

Holding true things back, for important reasons?

It doesn't mean that your story is false, and it does not mean that your story is unimportant.

Yes, your story—the one in which you are the main character—the one in which you stand just off to the side, doing what you can, while a great battle is happening just out of your reach.  

It is real, it is important, because your heart matters too.  And maybe there's a safe audience:  a trusted friend, a small group of supporters, an audience to whom you can remain securely anonymous perhaps.  Or maybe it's just a private journal, or slips of paper that afterward must fall into the flames.  Or maybe it seems to come to nothing at all, just an unarticulated heart-hurt.  Like a wispy tendril of poetry that circulates in your heart for years, never written down, because you can find no words that will catch it and pin it down without destroying it in a puff.

I'm just saying, it's real, and there is something that will come of it, someday; because it's you, it lives in you, in the works of your hands and in the spark that is common to every human life.

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Luke 2:19

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Comments

[mandamum]

Thank you for this, Erin.

[joy]

This is beautiful. Prayers for you and your loved one.

[Angela]

I have thought about Erma Bombeck off and on over the years, too, and I share a similar childhood love of her and view of her role as the mother of all bloggers. Delicacy and confidentiality in regaling stories about our families is something that does beg reconsideration in our current culture. Thank you, Erin!