Story of the Day

I grew up loving books. Our bedtime story shelf was robust, colorful, haphazard and overflowing. We had many of the classics, and a great selection of rarer gems, thanks to my grandmother, who worked for a major children's publishing company.

My younger sister and I never lacked for good stories, and growing up in the age of the early home video meant there are some precious (and dusty) VHS tapes floating around somewhere of my father reading to us, each of us tucked under an arm in our matching pajamas.

That said, the stories I remember most are the ones my mother told about the day that had just passed. They always began, "One morning in June [or whatever month it happened to be], two little girls woke up in their beds." She'd go on to narrate every detail of the day she could recall, including things like what we ate for lunch, and whether we went to the park. My sister and I would chime in with commentary, or things she'd missed. And they'd usually end, "...and then everybody put their heads down, and got under the covers, and went to sleep."

Usually, she told the whole story herself, as she'd seen it, the omniscient narrator with a front-row seat to our lives. But sometimes, if we'd spent part of the day apart - say, a visit to Grandma's - she had us fill in the missing pieces. Being able to participate in the telling was empowering, but I liked it best when I could lie down and listen to the patient hum of my mother's voice telling us about our lives in the same cadence with which she read a "real" story aloud. I paid attention to the shifts in her voice, the way she used pitch and volume to make things more dramatic. I didn't have words for any of this, of course, but I soon began to imitate her style when telling stories of my own - echoes of which I can still hear in my own voice today.

I don't know where she got the idea - maybe it was something she saw in a parenting book or magazine. Maybe she was so tired and out of ideas one night that she just started doing it.

However it happened, I loved it.

Something important emerged when my mother told those stories. The details of the day got sharper, more vivid. Seemingly unrelated events suddenly felt connected. Even though there were no fantastical elements - she never declared us heroes or princesses or anything - we were clearly the protagonists, the central characters in the day's events. The things we did mattered.

It was an unintended crash course in the power of storytelling.

I remember that my mother was often tired, leaning her head back against the wall with her eyes closed as she recounted the events of the day.

Sometimes, my sister and I chimed in with our favorite bits to make sure they would be included - the exact color of a popsicle, the drama of a scraped knee. The story gave them weight and consequence. Including them in the telling was like seeing them on the front page of our very own newspaper.

Sometimes, hearing her tell the events of the day helped put them into perspective, showing us that tantrum or argument was only a small piece of an overall good day. Sometimes, she highlighted things that particularly delighted her that I might've otherwise forgotten - something funny one of us said, or a spontaneous dance we'd made up.

What better way to tell a child that their life matters?

We didn't give up on books, of course. The Story of the Day often followed a reading of Dr. Seuss, Goodnight Moon, or something like At Taylor's Place (one of the most soothing books ever written, and an underrated classic.) Nevertheless, it's those loosely-spun stories featuring two unremarkable little girls and their unremarkable adventures I hold closest - the moments when, just for a moment, everything I did mattered enough to make the front page.