Sometime last year, I started reading Kathryn Stockett’s novel, The Help after learning that my friend Candis had read it in two days and loved it.  Although I tried desperately to keep art in my life in the exhausting year after my son was born, also working full time and going to graduate school a couple or three days/nights a week just consumed me.  So, I set the book aside.  And forgot where to find it.  Finally, this summer, I picked it back up and flew through it.  By that time, the whole world knew about it, and the film had been made, and the ads were on television and the internet.  I tried not to see them, as I always do when a book that I’ve loved is being made into a film — I don’t want any casting director’s vision of what a character looks like to morph my own image of what that character looks like.

Having seen the film, I can honestly say, I don’t know that I would have made a single different casting decision — for the female roles anyway.  I did not retain any burned-in images of the male characters except for Skeeter’s suitor, Stuart, and I think that actor seemed to do a pretty good job of portraying him.

I went with my mom and my sister because we all read the novel, and amazingly, I have somehow learned enough patience over the years to control the impulse to go on opening day and just pretend later on that I had waited for whomever I was supposed to wait.  (Not that I’ve ever done that.  Or told someone they hadn’t awakened me when they called).  As we were walking out of the theater, my mom commented, “You know, you just can’t have any real idea of what that was like if you didn’t grow up like that.”  To which my sister replied, shocked, “You grew up with ‘help’?”  And my mom says, “Yes, girl, her name was Maude, and she cooked and ironed for us, and she helped take care of us . . . she spent the night in your aunt’s bed when she would spend the night.”   My sister, still surprised, says, “How did y’all afford to pay someone to help?”  Mom:  “Well . . . we didn’t pay her very much.”

Huh?  Of course, when my mom gets on the phone with her sister, there appears to be some disagreement about whether or not Maude spent the night sometimes or not.  Mom goes on to say that Maude did not work exclusively for their family, that she also worked for another family, whose patriarch enjoyed going out to a local honky tonk on Saturday nights, leaving his wife at home with a lot of children.

As we were walking to our cars, my sister said, “So . . . can we all get together sometime and talk about this . . . ?”

Anyone who knows me knows that I love to write and record, well, my life, basically.  Someday, should anyone care to read what, to date, are about 27 years’ worth of journals, they will see that there are great gaps at varying times of my life.  And, in retrospect, I am not always proud of what I have done or recorded (in minute detail, at times), but I can assure you that it is all recorded as best I can recollect.  I hope that one day, all of those words will give my son a sense of “being,” of having had a mother who dreamed and struggled and won and lost; a mom who on any given day might have been doing things that would make her family very proud or very ashamed to claim her.  I hope that he will dig through the details with fervor and will not feel the slightest sense of never really having known his mother.  On the other hand, I hope that he will laugh and cry and smile a knowing smile that reflects the truth he senses in his soul that this is exactly how I pictured the way his mother’s life would have been.

Research has shown that children who know their “story” — where they came from, who their parents really are/were, are better able to navigate their lives.  I cannot put my hands on the book right now, but I believe I read that in a great book called Parenting From The Inside Out, which I bought on the recommendation of a Head Start training facilitator back in 2004 or so, in Region VII.  Way before I was considering mothering someone myself.

Write your stories.  Write them somewhere that no one will find them while you’re still here if you don’t want them to — but write them.  Don’t leave your children without their history, without their anchor.  Tether them to the past, even thought it may not be all happy and shiny.  The good, the bad, and the ugly make us who we are.  And if we have those stories to share, maybe we have the opportunity to guide someone else through a similar struggle.

You never know.  Your story might be just the one that someone else needs to hear.