My almost 5-year-old son loves to listen to stories. At first, he wanted me to read to him at home. He still loves to curl up with mom to be read to (and I love it, too!), but he recently expanded his love of stories.
He started asking me to read to him in the car. Now, obviously, I'm not going to read to him while driving. I'm talented, but I'm not that talented! So I started telling him stories that I remember. That development happened right around the time we made our first trip to Disney world, so suddenly I was telling him princess stories every morning (and evening and any other time we hopped in the car). While I don't mind the occasional Disney story and I tried to mix things up by varying my stories, by about the ba-zillionth re-telling of Cinderella, Aladdin and Sleeping Beauty, I was ready to start some new stories.
So I decided to go to my treasure-trove of childhood memories, those experiences of growing up in the wilds of South Carolina that have shaped me into the person I am today (and a pretty snazzy person, at that, if I do say so myself!) and that he won't get a chance to experience.
Re-telling those stories made me realize a couple of things:
* I am really lucky to have grown up the way I did.
* I am REALLY lucky to have turned out as normal as I did.
* As strange as it was, I wouldn't trade my childhood for any of the "normal" ones I thought I envied as a kid.
The more memories I dust off and share with my son, the more I treasure the different-ness (growing up in an underground house), odd-ness (not having central air or heating until I was in grade school) and general outside-looking-in-ness (Midwest-born parents raising their Catholic kids in the very rural, predominantly Baptist South Carolina upstate) of my upbringing. And re-telling those memories has also made me want to share them with a slightly wider audience, so you may see more of them popping up around here. Starting off with ... (and yes, I'm ending that way on purpose!)
