It's only a story...?

My 3 year old son loves stories.  I don’t just mean the weekly library trip and bedtime storybooks - he has a real love of spoken stories.  He asks me or my husband to tell them several times a day, often the same ones repeated.  It’s also a measure of closeness.  You know you’re in his most trusted circle when he asks you to tell him a story (Nan and Auntie Ria have recently been invited to join these inner echelons). 

When I start to think about the stories themselves, I realise they aren’t just something enjoyable and entertaining.  He really needs these stories.  One of his favourites at the moment goes something like this:

“Mum, you know that story about when Nan was a little girl and she was on her red bike and then she fell off and got an ouch on her knee and then her mummy put some cream on her knee and gave her a plaster?  Can you do that story please?”

He usually asks for it immediately after he’s hurt himself.  It functions to help him process the experience, as well as to understand that other people have painful experiences too, that they deal with them and then move on.  He also gets to relish the idea that his silver-haired Nan was once a fearless pigtailed girl zooming down a hill.

As well as working through real experiences, stories help him with to work through and diffuse imaginary fears.  The other evening he was quite alarmed by the tigers that were in the room.  When I asked for their specific location he whispered intently that they were in the top of his body.  So we made a story where we took turns to pull a tiger out of his mouth, count to three and blow each one out of the window.

Since moving house in July we’ve had lots of maintenance people coming to fix things and we’ve also had two car breakdowns.  So a major theme over the summer was mending and problem-solving.   This bred a whole miscellany of stories about boilers, screwdrivers, magic garden walls and breakdown trucks.  I also took it as a sneaky opportunity to subtly challenge gender stereotypes in job roles, as so many maintenance workers he had encountered were men.  So in our story repertoire we now have female characters such as Sarah the crane driver, who crops up whenever a vehicle gets stuck in mud, and Sue the car-loader driver who gets a fair bit of air-time during motorway journeys.

This Christmas, my son will become a big brother for the first time.  In the lead up to him having a sibling, we’ve done lots of stories and photos about when he/mum/dad/nan/granddad was a baby.  Songs have proved to be good for ‘new baby’ story inspiration too.  Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely appears on one of our car compilation CDs and so we told him the story of the song’s inception.   Our embellished version has Stevie going to the hospital to meet his new baby daughter, giving her a name, counting her tiny fingers and toes and then going home to write a song for her on his piano.

Stories also provide a living connection to family memories and heritage.  My husband is from Kosovo, and he often tells our son tales about his childhood growing up in a mountain village with a smallholding.  He has endless material on the idylls and hardships of this kind of rural life, bordering into fairy-tale territory: falling out of cherry trees into bramble bushes, spotting an elusive wolf or bear on the mountainside, caring for and learning to ride horses or chopping logs in time for the bitterly cold winters.

When I’m asked for the seventh time that day to do the ‘road builders’ story and I sigh inside (it’s my own fault for making that one so boring), I forget how much all this storytelling has taught me about creativity. It’s helped me to reconcile that caring for my son full-time and wanting to write are not necessarily two endeavours in opposition to each other.  Creative writing isn’t only something I do sitting at a desk in solitude, undisturbed and under ideal solemn conditions.  It’s more messy than that.

Then there’s the joy of improvising and the unexpected.  Can I slip in a funny new detail and will he notice?  How can I interrupt the usual words of the story and make it silly and fresh?  E.g. How many orange-y things can I replace a traffic cone with?  ‘Was it a fox?  A squirrel? A tangerine? A tiger?’ (cue giggles from my son).  Or there’s the collaborative aspect, where my son slots in all kinds of weird and wonderful alternate endings.  In actual fact, he’s the one teaching me about stories and the art of story-telling.

Spinning these yarns has really underlined for me how intimate, even sacred, the act of storytelling is.  What could be more intimate than sharing an imaginary space with another person, with all that that entails emotionally along a narrative journey?  There’s a sense, especially with oral storytelling, that we're making something unique and unrepeatable.  Being entertained is almost secondary to sharing together something fundamental to being human and making sense of the world.