Build your family lore
An oral storytelling family tradition
Kids generally love stories; my kids love being told family stories. Their favourites are stories of them when they were younger: the time that one of them was playing in muddy puddles on a rainy day and encountered a puddle that was much deeper than she expected; the time that we were driving home from the grandparents and suddenly found a small kids head pop up between the two front seats (we had forgotten to buckle her in). They laugh and laugh! Most of these stories are from a time they can’t remember, but they realize they are a character. Sometimes the story is more recent, and they’ll participate in the telling of it.
They also love stories about the broader family from before their time. I love telling embarrassing stories from when I was dating their mom, and they like hearing about the funny stuff their uncles have done over the years.
All of these are examples of family lore: a growing corpus of stories, myths and knowledge shared across generations. In other cultures around the world or through history this type of lore is an essential part of family and community practice; here in the modern west it is haphazardly formed at best. We’ve never deliberately tried to cultivate a rich family lore - to the extent that it exists, it has grown organically through the types of activity I pointed to above. But I’m trying to be more deliberate about this, and I think there’s a lot of benefit in doing so.
Building family lore knits the past and present together into a rich whole that everyone - kids and parents alike - will benefit from feeling more deeply embedded in. This is a sense of place in time, in a history, in a chain of people with their own lives and stories. Socio-spatially (I might have made that up), family lore also knits your isolated family node into a much broader network of characters. Not all of this history or network will be happy: there might be painful stories or broken relationships. Maybe those aren’t the ones you start with, but over time they probably form as important a part of the whole as the stories of deceptively deep muddy puddles.
Somehow, stories that everyone knows, that are familiar and shared and told with different inflections or details each time, are far less ephemeral than the physical or digital traces we build up around us over time. And I’ve found that if I tell stories, my kids tell stories more too. All of this builds up towards a richer, more solid pattern of behaviour - family practices - than might otherwise exist.
In the moment, it might be hard to recall the right stories to tell. I have a few that I can go to automatically, but many more that I might remember once and a while, but otherwise stay in deep storage. Hopefully over time the number of stories that live in accessible memory grows over time, and our family lore gets richer.