MY SISTER’S VERSION IS NOT MINE. Different because we grew up in the same household, not in spite of it, our looks back on life can be seen through one lens or the other–or both. Even the simplest stuff can have two versions, I’ve discovered, and while I’m getting more accustomed to the idea, I am deeply moved by the truth that for long periods of our lives I held my version against hers as the truth, the only truth, and nothing but the truth. Take for instance those early traumatic experiences. I suspect we may differ, even on those. I don’t know.
In a comment here, Jean L asks if we script these posts about my version and hers of our memories. We don’t. I write one and Margaret reacts. Margaret has no idea what topic I’ll bring to this public airing until she reads it online.
Perhaps the first trauma I remember was the child who was hit by the car right in front of our house. Dragged the length of our property line and dying in the street, there are fewer emotional Polaroids that bubble up in my head in such intense color. One neighbor brought sawdust to soak up the blood. Someone brought a blanket.
I have always considered it a tremendous mark of character that our mother neither made us go out and look at the accident, nor forbid us from looking through the bay window out onto the sadness as its tragedy unfolded. My across the street neighbors-my best friends-were marched out by their mother and made to stand over the scene until its completion, including watching the small body being loaded into the ambulance, and the delivery and spreading of the sawdust. The mother insisted that it taught them to ride their bicycles more safely. A devout Catholic, their mother was very much about consequences.
Even then I was grateful for our mother’s position on this: Not one to shield us, and not one to deny, disinclined to overexpose us to things that were horrific, she wanted us to empathize without being terrorized. I have always thought it a correct lesson.
That’s my version of it–and of her–at that time.
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I don’t recall the details that you do, nor Mommy’s reaction; I do recall his name, though.
He was Malcolm Flanagan. I think he attended St. Anastasia school down on Northern Boulevard, not P.S. 94 as we did, but I am not certain. I know that we did not know him.
Is my memory correct? I do not know. But when I read your post today I think about it as the day Malcolm Flanagan was killed; that’s my memory–a name attached to a sad moment where we learned about loss in an event that unfolded outside our window.
Well, that’s astonishing in itself. That you know his name. And, I must say, that I find it soothing–even all these years later–to hear it. I would have said the child was a girl; I had no idea you knew his name. The story, though in no way complete, is rounder now. Still terribly sad, my version still about the lesson, yours about the essential fact. How curious. How interesting. How sisterly, I’m learning.
I have been recording family stories for my children and nieces and find brothers and sisters often hold different versions of the “truth” of any particular incident. I am beginning to think some of this springs out of birth order, as older siblings tend to take, voluntarily or not, a partially protective role towards their younger sibs.
It might seem harsh to ask one child to assume a protective stance for a younger child. But looking back I do not recall it feeling so much a loss of childhood as it was a gain. That sense of “taking care of” seems to have provided a vantage point with some distance built in away from my own emotional reaction to events. I believe I was grateful, underneath, to be “worrying about” the baby brother rather than left on my own to sort out reactions towards our parents.
Hi, Deb: What a fascinating perspective, and one that merit real attention–that “taking care of” provide a vantage point of distance. Would you share with us why you’ve been recording family stories? And what have you come to think of “the truth” after all this? It seems we quest for it, and yet since it always depends upon the point of view, it remains forever elusive.
I’m intrigued by Deb’s idea of recording family stories from multiple perspectives. As Marion says, truth is forever elusive. But you can get a little closer to it if you have more than one person’s ossified memories to rely on.
I’ve often wondered what really happened when my maternal great-grandparents emigrated to Canada to escape pogroms in Russia. It was a hard journey and they had many children. My grandmother, a formidable woman with a lifelong need to be right, always said that her mother tried to abandon the youngest child, a sickly infant girl, on the dock. Grandma, then about 10, insisted on taking full responsibility for her baby sister, whom she carried on her back until the family reached their new home. Or so she said. Everyone who remembers that crossing is long dead, so it’s impossible to say what transpired on that dock and on the ship.
Grandma and her adored little sister Lucy remained a family within a family until Lucy’s death in middle age. Of course Lucy remembered nothing of the event that sealed their special bond. With this extraordinary tale, Grandma took control of a narrative that has shaped the imaginations of three generations of women in my family. She cast herself as a hero and her mother (about whom she never said one overtly critical word) as a monster. I’m sure her story is at least partly true. But I’ll wonder for the rest of my life about the other part, which she either didn’t see or chose to leave out.
Hello, Rona. Your questions are excellent, especially as posed through your inherited narrative. My favorite phrase about your grandmother is the one that leads off her tale, characterizing her (your characterization) as “a formidable woman with a lifelong need to be right,” immediately preceding the “always said,” which then relates her characterization of herself. Ah, family. These beads of ‘She Said, She Said,’ strung so closely together provide the best illustration I can think of of family narrative, and are so very much what we are after here on TSP. Thank you for giving us a perfect example of what we’re examining here. This heightens and adds to my understanding of what and who we are.