Sharing Yourself

Letting your kids see the things that formed you

I was in Germany last week to spend time with my mom’s older sister before she dies, which you probably read about in my other newsletter, Kick-Ass Heroines. While I was there, I got a Facebook reminder about this photo – taken seven years ago just around the corner from my aunt’s house. It was the first time I’d brought my kids to Germany, and it gave them an experience of life at my aunt’s house that had been so important to my own childhood.

The whole flight over from London, I had described the house, built in 1936 on a large piece of farmland that my aunt had turned into a garden so big it fed her whole family all year. The single bathroom was on the ground floor, and the function of the main rooms had changed over the years, depending on who was living in the house. Lots of time was spent describing the cold cellar, where leftovers were kept in covered dishes and the cakes that Tante Leni baked were stored to be served with afternoon coffee. My sister and I have vivid memories of the bounties of that cellar, so different from the house in California where we grew up, but most of my descriptions to my kids centered on the garden. A small garden house had been hurriedly made up for my dad and me (age 12) to sleep in when we surprised my aunt for a quick two-day visit on our trip around the world. It was a clubhouse of sorts when my cousins were young, the best place to tuck away for hide-and-seek, and a place to store the outdoor chairs and tables for garden parties with the whole family.

The times I’d visited my aunt during the summer had been spent mostly outdoors, picking cherries from the trees for breakfast, and digging potatoes for lunch. There were gooseberry plants, and lovely strawberries, and enough green beans could be gathered every day for a whole family meal.

When I arrived at my aunt’s house with my kids seven years ago, we were housed in the big bedroom upstairs where the photo albums my mom had sent over the years were stored. They were interested in everything, and I could see them matching the reality of the narrow twisting staircase to the one I’d described, the strange pass-through from entry hall to kitchen that the family had used when my uncle’s mother occupied the main floor rooms, and all the hidden shelves and corners of the cellar which still held the last potatoes of the much smaller garden crop.

Describing my memories of those summers didn’t scratch the surface of what sharing it with my children in person was like. They now understand my obsession with other people’s gardens, and they’ve experienced sleeping under a proper German featherbed. Bread, butter, and salami makes sense in a way it never did before, and trying a few words of a new language isn’t quite so daunting when you’ve heard your great aunt stumble to say “sleep well” in English.

I’m a storyteller, and sharing my world with words is my job. But when I can share an experience with someone in person, especially an experience that helped form me, it adds another layer of connection to a relationship. So often, we view a parent/child relationship as a one-way street of caretaking and giving, but when adults share themselves with their kids, it’s like saying “I trust you with a bit of myself.” And those moments of handing our kids our trust can become building blocks for their own trust in us, so that maybe, just maybe, they’ll share themselves with us right back.