memoirs

The Morphing Memoir

| Flower Roberts

What happens when the storyline falls apart and you are left looking at a completely different tale. In my digging through family artifacts to write a book that was supposed to be about paternalism and over-reaching parenting in past generations of my family history, I have discovered evidence to the contrary that was never mentioned.

The thread that joined the parts has been broken. The stories have shifted. How do I piece this history back together. No one is left alive to ask about any of this.

Does every family clean up their past and hold the next generation to higher standards? What do I do with this mess?

It is funny how one conversation or one letter can change everything.

Envelope with a surprise inside. No date stamp.

I found this last night as I purged another box of letters and papers. I may have seen this letter before in the box of letters from my Gran to my great, great aunt Ethel. I got up in the middle of the night to check for a date stamp on the envelope. There was not one.

Inside this envelope was a letter from my mom’s sister thanking her for sending the copy to be copied.

So my mom found this letter after my Gran died and thought enough of its contents to mail it to Canada to be copied and returned.

Box of letters that looks like a book on bottom shelf, far left, bottom of the stack.

This flagged that letter for me. Upon closer inspection, I realized a new part of the story was in there. How did I miss this? My cousin now has the originals. I am anxious to see if this letter is in the box and if it has my sticky note attached to it. This will confirm my craziness!

I must add a side story here. I found the box of letters from my Gran to Aunt Ethel in 2024 as we were cleaning out the house to sell it.  I took pictures of everything in the house in 2022. I did not know that the box of letters was actually a box, because it was disguised as a book. So to find photo of where it was all those years, I had to go through thousands of photos, mostly plants, to find a picture of the bookcase in my parents’ bedroom.

It has occurred to me that I am the only one who can carry this through.  I am the one with the photos and memories. I would never have had the time to do all this if bad things had not happened to put me in the right place as the world has shifted around my family.

I will continue until the universe stops me.

Stay tuned.

FLOW

THENs and NOWs

| Flower Roberts

I am tackling some hard questions as I lay out my plans for the three different storylines. I was kept awake last night by the imbalance of the three parts. I have drawn these out has three sets of circles. The working title for the book is TIME CIRCLE TRIO, but that will morph like many other parts.

The characters in the oldest story are long gone. The journals of the main character were burned, rightly so. I have hundreds of photos and artifacts from the life of the first pair, but only one photo and a sad newspaper clipping of the supporting man. This is so not fair and must be dealt with. He was a person, not a prop.

The second story involves two men who have passed on and a woman who has dementia. The catalyst for this tale was some things she said while she was already suffering from dementia, so they may not be true. There is no one alive to correct this. I do have many old letters so I do feel like I can get a good grasp on these characters. But there was no smoking gun, only the ramblings of an old woman struggling with confusion.

The latest story morphs on a regular basis. This is because there are THEN and NOW  factors that must be teased apart. The THEN was over forty years ago and the NOW involves a conversation over five years ago and a revelation about it last spring. This needs clarification.

The THEN was a beast to deal with at the time. Judgement was called into question at a point when many important choices needed to be made. Confidence was shattered and perspective was altered. This result seemed to snowball over the next year and beyond.

When the third NOW occurred there was grief and loss in every direction. The past was being frantically sifted through until it seemed to transform and expand to confuse what was real and of value. The NOW has no chance to be remedied or clarified due to death and memory loss. So this circle keeps getting bigger with no possibility for balance.

The one thread that links all three circles is faith in judgement. Does anyone have a right to make decisions for another adult? In these cases, do the parents have the right to make decisions for their young, adult daughters? And when they do(which they did), what are the extrinsic and intrinsic results? Maybe what looks from the outside to be the wrong choice is really the right choice from a different perspective?

In these three stories I have observed the THEN parts of these three young women and the NOW (results) decades later.  Their over-ruled hopes and dreams were still alive in these three as older women. That’s the gist of it. The prevented  mistakes they were not allowed to make were not mistakes to them.

Ouch!