Parallels: Writing My Grandmother’s Personal History

In the fall of 2018, I asked my grandmother if she would want to write her personal history. In the next two years, this project anchored me through a pregnancy, a complete turnover at work, a spouse in grad school, and a pandemic.

Tell your mother I am very interested in her ‘historical proposal’.” — Polly in a letter to my son, Dec. 2018

During Christmas 2018, we sat at my mother’s kitchen counter and recorded my grandmother telling stories of her childhood on my phone. Stories about childhood during the Great Depression, coming of age during World War II, early marriage and teaching in the 1950s, and raising a family during the Civil Rights movement. I transcribed the stories and gave her a list of prompts to spark more memories.

A month later, I found out I was pregnant with my daughter, her first great-granddaughter. I spent the next year and a half moving through the phases of childbearing while working on her story. I worked on it in afternoon nap windows and middle of the night feedings. I worked on it in the kitchen and next to the washing machine and in the kids’ room and curled up in bed — and at one point on a step stool in the hallway. I knew I would get it finished, but I was impatient with myself.

It’s both harder and easier to complete a biographical work for someone you know. I found myself remembering stories she’d told or family members she didn’t initially mention, and I ended up with far more detail than I would have for someone whose life I hadn’t heard about all my life. This also made it easier. There were times I needed filler or transition material, and I knew which parts of her life I could find them in.

I proofed the hard copy over the summer of 2020, finalizing the photos and captions, and hitting publish. This year at Christmas, amidst COVID-19, we were able to officially gift the final product.

With everything that happened last year, finishing Polly: Memories of Minks and Mirandas felt like a small personal win against disease, against chaos, against babies growing up — against the march of time, in general. Together we made bygone memories permanent.

What a gift.

I’ll never forget the feeling I had the first morning I was home from the hospital when my son was still in the NICU. It wasn’t sadness. It wasn’t disappointment. It wasn’t even worry (plenty time for that later).

It was profound surprise. Surprise at how beautiful and delicate and wild life truly is.

I get a similar feeling reading my grandmother’s stories. There’s profound surprise in the parallels between her time and my time, between her time and my mother’s, between her time and what I imagine my daughter’s time will be like someday.

Parallels between both the highs and lows of growing up, of marriage, of raising children.

As I tried this past year to hold the house together and work with screaming children in the background, I identified with my grandmother scooping a dropped casserole off the floor and serving it anyway. With the unrest across the country, I identified with my grandmother watching the Civil Rights movement unfold on television while potty-training and diapering and endlessly sorting through children’s clothing. It’s been heartening for me to think of her stories of unsung mothering while I’m currently fighting for the life of my own hapless casseroles.

I realize now that this book has been years and years in the making. It was forming in my brain every time I heard about how my great-great-grandmother’s canary would let everyone know she was eavesdropping when she would listen in on the party line. It was forming when I heard about my mother and her sisters reading at the dinner table. It was forming when I found out my great-grandfather brought a litter of puppies to the hospital when my grandmother had her appendix out. It was forming when I had a dream about my grandmother’s uncle calling me on an antique wall telephone and told me, “Keep writing,” when I asked him, “What do I do?” It was forming when I saw those notes outlining my grandmother’s life next to the piano phone on the roll-top desk.

It was forming when I was a counselor listening to people’s stories — stories that would never get written down.

It was forming when I talked to my other grandmother about genealogy. Without her example, I may never have understood the value of privately publishing.

It was forming when my mom and I updated the family history a decade ago, and each and every time we have ever discussed family history, which is a million times — in a million moments.

My mother laid the foundation for this project long before I was born.

Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing when I’m writing down everything I write down. Am I just doing it for me? Yes, but like my mother, I’m also laying a foundation for someone else. I remember how important both my grandmothers’ — and all my relatives’ — stories are to me, and I know somewhere down the line there will be someone who needs to hear my stories. Not because they’re particularly unique or interesting, but because they will anchor future generations in a specific belongingness that only comes from our ancestors.

My grandmother and I have a certain conversational dynamic in common that I finally recognized: we don’t always share things unprompted. We wait for someone else to initiate. When I realized that, I knew from my counseling background that so many of us are just waiting for someone to ask a direct question or say, “Tell me about…” and suddenly, we take the floor to tell our story.

This is when I’m grateful for my years working as a counselor. I’ve spent enough years asking hard questions that I can now force myself, unprompted, to have important conversations I may have never felt it my place to initiate. Because it’s easy to never ask. When I started this project, I had three living grandparents; now, I have one.

So ask and write it down. Lay the foundation for future generations to build upon. You’ll never regret the time spent, and you’ll give yourself the gift of profound surprise.

For those interested in self-publishing or creating similar projects, I used Blurb with its free book formatting software BookWright, and Canva to design the cover.