The sixth grade Language Arts curriculum at my son’s school requires students to write a memoir. At age 11, there are only so many significant, story-worthy events these kids have experienced. My son has been writing out his timeline, highlighting events that have provided life lessons, and working to find the way to tell the story he wants to tell that makes it interesting enough, has just a touch of poetic license, but keeps him true to his own history so it can be an actual memoir. We’ve had discussions about this tricky, tricky realm – how to separate creative nonfiction from memoir from semiautobiographical fiction. How much can we embellish our history and still have it be considered truth? And how does intentional embellishment differ from what our memories will do for us over time – select and polish small nuggets of experience, spin the emotional valence just so, and become a defining, often-told narrative that may or may not ever have actually happened like we tell it to ourselves and others.
My son has chosen the first day of kindergarten. If I were writing his biography, I’m not sure I’d start with that day, as my version of his timeline is notched quite differently. But he’s the author of this assignment, not me. I asked him to describe what aspects of the day he will be writing about, and he is telling the story of how he was initially scared, but the Principal talked to him and called him by his name and after that everything was OK and by the end of the day he was feeling brave and happy.
His memories have been shaped in the six years since that day by a myriad of factors: his own memory, the story he has heard his parents tell about his first day, the encapsulated mythic legacy of the elementary school principal who knew all the names of the entering students before the first day even began, and whose photographic name memory and deep individual interest and care for young persons went unmatched by the interim and temporary principals who came after.
His narrative omits several components that shape our parental narrative of that first day of school. Namely, his teacher, Mrs. McD., who was maternal and passionate and creative and safe and loving and accepting. She was with him every day that year, and sometimes he dreamed of her at night. One dream he told us was in symbols and metaphors of sexual exploration and acceptance. The Principal may have known his name, but Mrs. McD. tapped something far more primal in him. She was his first love object other than me.
Thankfully, 11-year-olds don’t know much about their unconscious realities, and are freed up to live in the whirlwind of consciousness. I am forever indebted to Ms. C., the energetic, overly-ambitious 6th-grade teacher who finds it in her heart and in her pedagogy to encourage students to envision their lives from the standpoint of a reader. He is pulling out this memory and reworking it to suit him. He needs to be brave now, as a middle schooler, not just the little kid who was scared his first day of kindergarten. And he now remembers it this way. From this point onward, the memoir version will revise the memories that came before.
My son can’t bear to disappoint Ms. C. He works each night on his writing and reading, finishing assignments early, wanting to revise them, reading and rereading his words so that they find favor in Ms. C.’s bright shiny eyes. Ms. C. may yet show up in my son’s unconscious psyche, too – she is a bit like Mrs. McD. – filled with aliveness, enthusiasm, a hearty and easy laugh, an almost magnetic force that draws my son out and in to her realm, and eyes that sparkle when she sees my son. She’s a brunette, like Mrs. McD. Like me. The mold might be set.
I came across a George Orwell quote in a memoir I’m reading, describing the way in which although nothing might remain the same, in a country or a person, there is something that never changes over time:
What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece?
Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
I still have the first day of kindergarten photo, not on a mantel, but on my refrigerator. Perhaps that first day of kindergarten is the perfect topic for his memoir. He may be writing about a fundamental aspect of himself that will remain despite how many changes he makes over the years.
No matter how many times my son takes out and polishes his significant life events, no matter how many times he reworks them to meet a future understanding of himself and to address new developmental needs, he will remain forever the boy/child/man/son/father who opens to energetic, dynamic, laughing, loving (brunette) women, works to please them and remain in their favor, emerging brave and capable and more deeply himself, whatever hardship has to be overcome.
Write that.
George Orwell: ‘England Your England.’ First published: The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. — GB, London. — February 19, 1941.