love letters to storytellers: my mom
This was initially sent to newsletter subscribers February 1, 2022.
featured storyteller
There are two things that I have always admired about my mom: her love of reading and stories, and her in-depth knowledge and understanding of children. Since she was a kid, she’s loved to read to escape into different worlds and lives. She was the one that took me and my siblings to the library as kids, bringing with us a giant bucket that we would fill to the brim with books.
My mom has also worked in Early Childhood Education for my entire life, and I have seen over the twenty-some years of her career how much care and intention goes into caring for and educating young children. I am constantly left in awe of all of the layers and thought beneath every childcare activity, even something as simple as letting kids play with sticks outside. Early Childhood Education is about much more than looking after kids, but about influencing the most crucial part of a child’s development to set them up well for the rest of their lives.
My mom has always been interested in working with children since she was a young kid. No matter what work or field she found herself in, whether nursing, home care, or teaching, she found herself drawn to working with kids. When I asked her why she was so attracted to working with kids, she just shrugged nonchalantly, since for her there was never a question she would be doing anything else.
“I don’t know, I was just really good at it. One of the things was, I could always connect with the kids other people thought were hard kids or trouble makers. If there’s a kid in a room that drives all the other staff crazy, I say, oh, if I was in that room, I’d love that kid.”
“I think I can connect with them better because I see them as more than just difficult children. I see them for who they are as a person rather than who they are as a diagnosis. And they are so interesting! They think so differently than others; they have more of a sense of wonder, deeper feelings. I think that is how God sees people; God sees me for who I really am and still loves me. That care comes naturally to me.”
For my mom, an important part of caring for children, staff, and people in general is learning their stories. “Everyone has a story,” she says. “The staff do too. The only way to connect is to know their stories, to ask questions, and care about what’s going on in their lives. The more you know someone’s story, the deeper the connection.” And for the “troublemaker” kids my mom loves, often the stories aren’t very happy ones. Their backstories give insight into why they might act the way they do, which helps with understanding how to care for them well.
The only time my mom isn’t pausing thoughtfully over how to respond is when she is talking about Learning Stories, a program for recording learning happening at her child care centre, in order to share with others the work they are doing. My mom lights up when she talks about Learning Stories, and brings them up constantly, trying to express how amazing they are.
The way a Learning Story works is something happens that affects a staff member “on a heart level”, some way a child really impacted them. It is what the child is learning, but also what the staff is learning from the child. The recorded Learning Story then takes the form of a letter written to the child; essentially a love letter.
One Learning Story example she gives is one time, there was a kid on the autism spectrum who always wanted to go the store and buy toys and was always upset if he couldn’t do that. It took a long time for my mom to understand why he was so upset. Through talking together, eventually he was able to move on from just being upset he couldn’t go to the store to buy a toy, and actually made his own stuffed toy, with suggestions from my mom. “I affected him and he affected me,” my mom says. “I learned don’t give up and keep trying to understand someone else.”
It's all connected. Stories create connection, whether it be in the brains of young children, or between people, and the creation of those connections demonstrate care. Stories, for my mom, are about caring.
updates
this is a love story is currently in the trusted hands of my illustrator (who you will meet soon!), as we work on putting images to the poems and pieces in this collection. Since most of the work is currently on my illustrator’s end, this means my question now is, what next?
Part of pursuing writing as a career means committing to submitting work to publications. Currently, I am looking at submitting work to literary journals, which is a fascinating industry unto itself, but also intimidating as I read these publications and the excellent writing contained within them. Questions and self-doubt arise: can I really do this? Am I good enough? What do I write? What if I don’t belong in these spaces, in this industry?
One of the books I read this month was Refuse: CanLit in Ruins, which is a collection of essays, poems, and other writings that speak to events in Canadian publishing around 2016-2017 that involved many Canadian authors (some very well known) supporting a creative writing program chair who had had allegations of sexual assault made against him. This event brought forth discussions of how "CanLit", or Canadian Literature, is a project of Canadian nation-building, and not the accepting, welcoming, and diverse place it often claims to be (much like Canada itself). It was an interesting book to read as I am thinking about entering those very industry spaces. It made me wonder, where does my voice belong? How can I lift up other voices? What am I getting myself into?
In thinking about submitting work, I’ve also been listening to Rachel Thompson’s Write, Publish and Shine podcast, which is an excellent podcast that features so many thoughtful, articulate writers. The thing that comes up most in this podcast, as Rachel interviews editors of Canadian literary magazines, is the importance of writing what is important to you, and not worrying too much about what it means if you’ve been accepted for publication – there are a million and one factors that go into publishing a work, and it does not necessarily mean your work is not good enough. The best writing, and the writing that often stands out to editors, is writing that is authentic, the things that you want to write the most, that are bearing your soul.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about the incongruency between the actual act and art of writing, which is something that is part of expression, telling stories, breaking silence, etc., and the act of publishing, which is a business, often mired in issues of gatekeeping, colonialism, patriarchy, and numerical and financial measures of success. I have to constantly remind myself I write first and foremost for me, because writing helps me make sense of my story, and my desire for sharing my writing is about making connections overall. I can get caught up in newsletter subscribers or Instagram followers, but that’s not what this is about.
This is about stories.
Happy February.
Alyssa