By Ilene Alexander
Old stories and new stories are essential: They tell us who we are, and they enable us to survive. We thank all the ancestors, and we thank all those people who keep on telling stories generation after generation, because if you don’t have the stories, you don’t have anything.
– Leslie Marmon Silko
You likely know the 20 Questions game in which players ask yes/no questions to identify a particular person, place, animal, object, or concept one of the players has in mind. A game for passing time with family while travelling or among friends learning a bit more about each other’s lives and interests while just hanging out, this game focuses on discovering answers to trivial questions. An amusing pastime that evokes good feelings, it seldom leads to forming memorable insights about people.
I have in mind a different set of 20 questions, the Do You Know Survey developed by Marshall Duke, Robin Fivush, and Sara Duke. Their questions cluster into two broad categories—family origins and histories and birth and family trait stories. Overall, these who, what, when, where, why queries focus on basics such as parents’ and grandparents’ growing up, meeting, and marrying stories; their recollections of good and bad experiences in school, work, life, and health across generations; and learning appreciatively about family members’ national, ethnic, cultural, and/or immigration backgrounds.
The key factor is how the stories are transmitted—through consistent, undistracted conversations during which family members listen and engage with multiple perspective-taking stories over many years. These regular gatherings create opportunities for children to hear a family’s history, build emotional strength, foster resilience and well-being, as well as develop a sense of self-identity within the intergenerational narratives. The power of family storytelling lies in its ongoing, meaningful presence rather than in isolated moments of information sharing.
Given the gift of oscillating stories—the “life has ups and downs” stories told overtime by multiple people—I believe I’ve navigated, dare I say enjoyed, my DNA discovery because my raising up families sparked curiosity to seek stories however family shaped itself.
Now, let me tell you a bit about how I came to realize old and new stories as essential for sense-making of the new DNA-provided stories.
The fingerprint ghosting the black and white photograph above suggests to me that Pops made this image while becoming acquainted with his new Polaroid Land Camera, a 1960s version with the bellows and a pop-up flash, and loaded with black and white film that sandwiched photo paper and chemical emulsion in a packet that could be pulled apart to reveal fully processed image after a shutter click and a minute’s time. Mom made other images that day in the Tracy backyard, checking out this new camera. Both my parents, gifted with their own cameras during their 1940s teen years, were part of families that valued the joy and history captured in family portraits and snapshots.
Early on, Mom and Pops taught me, the kid in this photo and their only child, to see my worlds through multiple lenses—cameras and words and feelings. The stories I took in— then and now—are shaped by friends and families, reporters and researchers, music and art, students and strangers, perceptions and dialogues. In writing and sharing autobiographical or pedagogical stories now, I need to— at least imaginally— put my butt back onto the Adirondack chair arm of that photograph to orient my nervous system again to safety.
That’s Grumpy at the left of the photo sitting on the edge of the chair, shirtless behind his bibbed overalls, elbows and forearms resting on thighs so that the balled up right hand fits inside the open left palm. While his mouth shape suggests he had been speaking, his eyes focus somewhere beyond Gram and me on the other half of the two-person, Grumpy-made chair. Most often, he joined conversations briefly and quietly—listening at length, then offering a fleeting sneer or smile, guffaw or sigh; or moving back in his chair as if to punctuate a comment, or forward in preparing to further the telling.
At the right, ah, that’s Gram with a fresh wash and curl from Dot’s down the street, her grey shining as it weaves with yet-black strands. That day’s pastel housedress is smoothed over her knees so she can sprawl her legs, relaxing her entire body into her side of the chair. Always, it’s her face and positioning of both arms that draw viewers into this photograph: Her head is tilted to look directly from her cat-glasses enhanced face onto my own smaller upturned face. Her left arm curls around my back with its hand lightly holding the hem of my shorts. Her right arm completes the circle around me, resting as it does on the tennis-shoe-shod feet I’ve plopped into her lap. Her facial features express quiet attention—she’s fully engaged with whatever taIe I am telling.
And me, the 3½-year old wearing that summer’s favourite striped t-shirt and cuffed shorts? My hands and arms mirror Grumpy’s pose. I’ve got my own Gram-like cat eye glasses to let me see things up close. These decades later, I’m drawn to the scrunched-up lips and relaxed jaw line that suggest I felt at ease—completely safe, actually—in talking with intensity as a granddaughter invited to take her place in this family.
This right section draws most viewers’ attention, having brushed past Grumpy’s seeming disengagement to focus on the more interactive half of the photo. I’m drawn to the wider view that offers a lens onto what I’ve come to learn as necessary components for storytelling: listening to others’ stories, telling one’s own stories, and seeking to understand the positive, negative, and oscillating themes and threads of storytelling across time.
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A handful of years later, in 1967 or 1968, as part of a 5th grade language arts unit focused on learning, talking, and writing about our own family histories, I prepared for an upcoming assignment by arraying a selection of family photos and ephemera around a hand painted wedding plate recording my parents’ wedding month and year, December 1956. Having recently celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary, I knew the date and did the math: the span between 28 December to 5 February, my birthday, was and is one month and eight days.
When the time came to share what I was learning about my family with deskmates, I must have disclosed the wedding-birthday data as part of what I’d discovered. I would be among those who would learn a year later in a “human reproduction” unit that normally pregnancy followed marriage, and that babies formed over a nine-month period. Turns out some of my classmates had already learned this information, along with learning ways of appraising births that happened outside these parameters. And they had also learned, at home or in church, ways of naming and shaming someone born outside that normally: Illegitimate. Bastard. Two new words for me that day.
I brought that story home. I knew that home was a safe place to make sense of those words. My parents’ response was clear: Those attitudes were illegitimate. Children are never illegitimate.
Our conversation reprised parts of my birth story I already knew: Labor started earlier than expected, which found my Mom calling the doctor’s phone service and her oldest sister, who organized their taxi ride to the hospital. Pops got the 2 am phone call from my aunt while at the Tracy homeplace as his overnight stay on his traveling sales route, which is also when Gram and Grumpy learned that there was a pregnancy in addition to the recent marriage. And, as the embellishment Mom loved to tell, everyone fell in love with that dark haired, cross-eyed, yawning, wiggling baby girl named for her maternal grandmother. As a follow up, Mom introduced me to one new story via Gram’s “congratulations on the new baby card,” asking me to read the opening line aloud: “Well, speak of surprises, this was a lovely one.”
That night I heard about how the people who loved us told stories of their marriage and my birth with joy and celebration rather than shame. Jane Ogden and Amy Snyder note that “[H]ow the stories are told rather than the content of the stories per se has a greater influence on the process of intergenerational transmission between parent and child.” They identify that “how” as telling stories in a voice that conveys a positive valence. My parents’ genuinely positive emotional tone, I know now, played a significant role in deepening my senses of self and family, and snatching shame out of the frame.
The overall pattern that emerges from the accumulated shared stories also matters, according to Duke, Bohanek and Fivush. Based on recordings of family conversations, observations, and interviews, the research duo describes three narrative patterns:
- Ascending narratives focus on upward progress, meeting challenges, and creating new opportunities.
- Descending narratives focus instead on lost opportunities, social and personal stumbles, detrimental impacts of political and historical events, while also recounting re-grouping efforts.
- And oscillating narratives that weave the ups and downs together for a narrative that conveys variations in family life across persons and times.
The complexity inherent to oscillating narratives prompts children to notice alternatives and possibilities and fosters sense-making reflection for adolescents at a stage for developing a resilient autobiographical self who is an autonomous yet connected being.
In telling and retelling my birth story, my parents helped me weave an oscillating origins story that would accommodate new DNA knowledge.
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Given what I recall hearing, it’s likely not surprising that I put safety above honesty in completing that grade five family history assignment—to write a short family history or biography drawn from interviews with a family member. The report I wrote focused on 1960s pop star Davy Jones, thanks to teen magazines chock-full of interviews. It felt safer to claim misunderstanding the assignment, so my year five teacher, Mrs. Hoagland, could tell me again “you’re not living up to your potential.” That script wrapped around me from second to sixth grade for asking too many questions, chatting to my classmates when my dyspraxic brain couldn’t keep track of spoken task lists, and talking back when I disagreed with a teacher.
And yet, I could have written dozens of family histories thanks to origins and histories stories from paternal homeplace gatherings, and coffees with my maternal aunts and uncles. I knew the stories and lineages of my grandmothers, Hannah and Ida, as well as their grandmothers, Hannah and Ida. More than that, I knew why I was named for two maternal Idas via my initials. And I felt the ways my brain had been shaped by two paternal Hannahs I came to know through Gram’s life-shaping stories and worlds carried forward through her grandmother’s journals and photographs.
When I took my first turn to share a story at that paternal homplace kitchen table, I told Gram of my classmates’ calling me bastard, naming me as illegitimate, and my decision to avoid the letter of the assignment. I expected to hear and talk through Gram’s recurring “What are you going to do about that?” query—her perpetual question to urge me to reflect on what next actions I might take to resolve a problem. I wasn’t expecting Gram to tell me her own birth story as also one of premarital pregnancy, given her May 1905 birthday and her parents November 1904 marriage date. With the details and positive valence of this story, Gram aligned her life with mine. She told her story with confidence and in confidence: with confidence in her character, and in confidence that I would honour her boundary to share this private story only within the family.
The telling and the boundary created a whole-family secret, one “known by the entire family but never shared with outsiders” (Vangelisti in “Family Stories and Family Secrets”). The grownups in my family were already in on the math linked to Gram’s birth, and, likely, to the timing of her own marriage relative to the birth of her first son five months and three days later, a calculation I wouldn’t perform for decades.
During my teenage years, Mom shared other premarital pregnancy family stories, all passed on during her own growing up: Her maternal grandparents became parents three months after their marriage. A sister who opted to raise her first born on her own and to be open about this within the family and when she married a few years later. A second sister who accepted an invitation from their oldest sister, the nurse, to live in her bigger city apartment near the maternity home that would place her child for adoption, and decades later accepted a husband’s command that she not tell their children about their half-sibling.
As I review both families’ premarital pregnancy stories from my newish not parent expected perspective, I recognize two things: each woman created her own way of navigating a premarital pregnancy, and that I was expected to navigate secrets, whether Gram’s whole-family secret told in confidence to guard her privacy within the larger community, or more tightly held intrafamily secrets from Mom’s family, intended to silence intergenerational transmission of women’s stories. Whole-family secrets “can actually bond family members together and create intimacy, in the sense of belonging to an in-group,” while intrafamily secrets limit who is allowed to know and often foster a sense of insecurity and betrayal when the secrets remain in the background or come to the fore (Vangelisti in “Family Stories and Family Secrets”). As with secrets generally, the combination of cultural and family contexts works to shape and coerce women’s choices about openness and secret keeping related to life experiences, identity, sexuality, and paternity.
In weaving me into paternal and maternal ways of telling of oscillating stories, Mom gave me access to the generation upon generation of navigating ups and downs, whether related to figuring life out or not, keeping whole-family secrets or no secrets, understanding how and why context muddied ancestors’ life decisions in small or huge personal moments, acknowledging damages wrought by family bullies and egotists as part of building ways forward, and making social families more often than entirely biological ones.
And it’s one unfinished story that helps most now in navigating the DNA discovery: Mom decided that her Lent giving up in 2005 would be to start sharing her long-withheld dating life stories about the time before and including Pops. That Easter day she said this: “The man I was seeing before your dad didn’t share my values. You would say he was sexist, racist, and homophobic. He also wasn’t kind like your father, so I chose to be in a relationship with your dad.” She promised to say more when I came home for her birthday in a few weeks. My mom unexpectedly died before her birthday.
In bringing me into the intrafamily secrets, I suspect Mom was preparing me to understand why she opted to protect her own paternity secret—choosing to hide culturally-expected shame about not knowing paternity even more than the fact of premarital pregnancy, and offering me a story collection for an “if and when” day of learning, as I did 13 years after her death, that I had both a genetic biodude who spawned a zygote and a social father who shaped a life.
Ilene Dawn (Ida) Alexander was most recently a teaching-learning consultant for the University of Minnesota, working with instructors and departments to (re)design courses for a broad range of learners in a variety of learning spaces. Having taught writing and literature courses, and American, Women’s, and Queer Studies courses at high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels, Ilene retired the first day of the 2024-2025 academic school year. Now retired for less than a year, she gets to decide how to use her own brain, read even more Welsh literature and theory, and study and write about whatever interests her. Of late, the study interests have been tarot and psychology, and the writing has focused on making sense of gaining NPE knowledge on what would have been her raising up/chosen father’s 88th birthday. Some of that writing shows up at thetruthofthings.blog. You can also find her on Instagram @IleneDawn, on Bluesky @ilene-dawn, and on Facebook IleneDawn.
