Story Time

Every month there’s a fun group that meets up at a local bookstore, and anyone who wants to can share a personal, true story. The group has very few rules. It has to be a story (not a poem or a song). You have seven minutes to tell it. You can read it or just talk off the top of your head. 

Our son invited my husband and me to the event. He’s one of the group's moderators. He said, Are you going to share a story, Mom? I said, no. But then, I don’t know what came over me. When the sign-up sheet came around, I wrote my name down and almost immediately regretted it. What story would I tell? 

It had been a long crappy day. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this—if you’re a person who does not live in Ohio or know about Ohio politics—but there’s a campaign ad that was recently put out by the Republican candidate running for governor. The ad features the mother of his opponent. In the ad the mother says, basically, Don’t vote for my daughter. She’s a liar. 

What the ad doesn’t say is that the mother hasn’t been in contact with the daughter for forty-eight years. When the daughter was twelve years old, she and her brother were taken away from the mother because the mother’s husband raped the daughter. The daughter testified in court and the mother ran off with the rapist, and the daughter never saw the mother again. 

That this would be an ad that a whole campaign of people would think was a good idea to make and air, that some people, (for example, the vice president and the president) would defend as just perfectly fine and dandy is something that I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around. I floundered around in the house for most of the morning. I was feeling the disgust of any decent human. But it was going beyond disgust. I was triggered. 

That’s a cliché kind of word these days, triggered, but I don’t know what else to call it. Triggered, for me, is one moment I am a happy, relatively content adult woman, and the next, it’s fifty years ago and I am eight years old, telling people, Listen, someone is doing something bad to me, and the people I am telling are saying, Shut up. 

You’re a liar. 

I surprised myself by bursting into tears. Surprised, because I thought I was past all of that, but apparently, this is how triggers work. On the plus side, I was able to pull myself together. I went on a two-hour walk with a friend. We walked through the woods and around the lake. The water was blindingly bright and blue. There was a nice cold breeze and I stopped thinking about shitty people and the shitty past. 

At the story time group, when it is your turn to tell a story, you stand up, and the people in the audience do a slow, building clap as you make your way to the stage. When you tell your story, they nod along enthusiastically. When you finish, they give you a loud applause. The story I told was not the story I told you today. It was a funny story about the time I got a tattoo. 

After my seven minutes were up, I settled back into my seat and nodded enthusiastically as other people told their stories. The woman who went on a bike ride with her father from Albany to Boston. The man who got bitten by a rabid fox. The guy who married his wife on a dock and after they said, I do, they held hands and jumped into a lake. 

The story time was over and the moderators thanked the audience for coming. We couldn’t have done this without you, they said. Otherwise, we’d be telling our stories to no one and it would just be weird. 

Everyone laughed. The room was pleasantly warm, and I was in one of my favorite places. A place filled with books and surrounded by family and new friends.

Thank you for listening to my story.