On Telling Stories

“We have a lot of kids,” I say to Chinua after we pick Kai up. The car is full of them, and this is so literal, in the space sense. Our car is full of our family. Six out of the seven of us now reach between 5’11” and 6’4”. In a Thai market, a Thai mall, a park, a street… we tower and fill the space. People stare. I mean, they always have, really, but the stares have changed from “awwww” to awe.

I feel the awe. And I feel the space between then and now, the space ahead that is unknown. What other people are there for us? Who else will be in our circles? How will we move through the world later, when we are not together?

We’ve had some starts and stops with the segmenting of our little unit. Right now, Kai will be back with us for a few months while he prepares to start school in the spring, we hope. The ache of separation is alleviated for a short time. There is a different ache. So many nearly adult minds are whirring close together.

I find myself speechless, at times.

And I am so immersed in our stories.

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Lately, I have been struck by how there are calls everywhere to make life into a formula or an equation. If you do this…advertisers, influencers, food and exercise specialists, parenting and schooling experts promise, and add this, you will have a sum or a product of this.

Hmm. I think it’s not going to work.

I love math.

I love the way it inhabits everything from plant cells to stars. I love the math of possibility, of chemistry, the math of art, the math of words and phrases, of rhyme and music.

And yet, humans evade simple formulas, don’t we? Simply by adding people into the formula, the equation breaks down.

There is, quite simply, no formulaic way to live life. No way to ensure health, faith, wealth, or lifespan of the people you love. I am sorry. I am sorry for us that this is true.

So what do we have?

What is life if not a formula?

The only answer I can come up with is: a story. A series of stories within stories within poems, within music, but all telling stories. I think. I can’t be sure because there is no formula. But Jesus didn’t tell parables for nothing, I am starting to see.

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In your twenties, perhaps, you still believe in formulas. Although something about this generation of upcoming twenty-year-olds seems to be that they, also, don’t necessarily believe in the formulas of the past.

(Study + Work + Consistency= A future—not necessarily.)

I had my own formulas, though mine weren’t exactly wealth-building formulas. They had to do with children and love and faith and care and work and community. I have lived a life where I have been loved and cared for by so many people—this is not a story about lack of love. But, maybe, lack of assurance. When some of my formulas broke down, I simply switched them out for others. Do this and this within a community and it will last forever.

Let’s just say that my formulas didn’t include a global pandemic. And so, now here we are with our community whittled away. But this is not our story. Our story is rich with love and beauty. This is how I will tell it, and how I will keep telling it.

And even though the formula for mothers seems to be to work and invest everything, literally everything, in order to end up alone, this also is not the story.

Because no formula can capture the beauty and tragedy of motherhood. Or community. In the end, I have no product to take out of my pocket or put in my bank account. I have days and days of lived experience, stories that no one can ever take away from me.

Build homeschool groups and teach so families will not move away is a formula with no product at the end of it, because it involves too many things that cannot be controlled.

It is a saggy, sad, pathetic formula.

But as a story, it says: We spent days and days laughing together, we made a play and performed it, and there have been hundreds of nights of playing “ghost” in the dark, skateboarding made a comeback, then build-up tag. I read so many books to so many kids, on good days and bad days, and sometimes it was so hot that I could barely stay awake. We wrote many words while the timer was running and made up silly stories and wrote them down. There was only one day that I walked out because no one was listening and I was fed up. We planted rice and climbed trees. We did this for over a dozen years, I loved the kids, too, all of them. And one by one they moved away, but every moment mattered.

*

What then, is a story? Maybe just a way of being close to your life. Of loving it and the world.

I love you, I love you. I love you now, and now, and now. In a story, people weave in and out like threads. There are acts and parts and chapters.

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There is a lot of power in telling your own story.

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And honestly, in life, formulas are terrible. They make you feel as though life is transactional and you are not doing it quite right. That if you had pinched a little here, pulled a little there, maybe you wouldn’t have aged. Or gone through normal sorrow. Or been in the beautiful mundane parts of life.

There is so much that formulas can never value, can never quite see. Tell your story, instead.

(More on how, later.)

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