I sat with my mother in the kitchen of my parents’ house in London last Sunday afternoon, and she told me a story I’ve heard, by my conservative estimate, somewhere between sixty and a hundred times.
The story is about a woman she used to work with in the early 1980s, a woman called J, who was, by my mother’s account, the most difficult colleague she ever had. The story has a shape my mother has perfected over forty years of telling it. It begins with the time J took credit for a piece of work my mother had done. It moves through a series of escalating small incidents, each of which my mother retells with the precise comic timing of someone who has, at this point, told this story in front of every audience available to her. It ends with the moment my mother finally, in the cafeteria of the hospital where they both worked, said something to J that resolved the conflict in a way my mother is, even now, slightly proud of.
I have been hearing this story since I was old enough to understand the words in it. I have heard it at family dinners. I have heard it in cars. I have heard it on the phone. I have, by this point, heard it so many times that I know exactly when the punchlines are coming, which means I produce the appropriate small laugh in advance of the line, which means my mother, gratified by my responsiveness, continues to tell the story, which means I have, in some sense, trained her to keep telling me the story.
For most of my adult life, when this story has come up, I have experienced a particular kind of internal sigh. Here we go. The J story. I would settle in for the duration. I would produce the laughs in the right places. I would think, in the back of my head, about the things I’d rather be talking about. I would, when the story ended, change the subject as smoothly as I could.
What happened last Sunday, somewhere in the middle of the story, was that I understood, for the first time, what the story was actually for.
The function of the story
I want to describe what I figured out, because the figuring-out has changed something for me about how I will listen to my mother for the rest of her life.
I had been operating, for forty years, on the assumption that the J story was being told to inform me. That my mother was telling me the story because she wanted me to know about J. The story, in this framing, was a piece of communication. The communication was about the events. The events were the point.
This is, I now believe, almost entirely wrong. The events are not the point. The events have not been the point for at least thirty years. The events were the point in the early 1980s, when J was an active difficulty in my mother’s life and the story was a way of processing what had happened. By the time my mother was telling the story to her teenage son in 1995, the events had already become something else. They had become, in some way I didn’t see at the time, a vehicle.
What the vehicle is for, I now understand, is closeness. My mother is not telling me the J story to inform me about J. She is telling me the J story because the J story is one of a small number of narratives she has access to that produces, reliably, the experience of closeness between her and me. The story has, by now, been told so many times that it has become a kind of shared object between us. We both know it. We both know how it goes. We both know when to laugh. The telling and the listening, performed together, generate, for the duration of the telling, a small, warm zone of mutual familiarity that nothing else in our daily contact reliably produces.
The story is not communication. The story is a ritual. The ritual is the closeness. The information content of the ritual is, in some real way, beside the point.
How I figured this out
I want to describe what happened in the kitchen, because the figuring-out arrived in a particular way that I think is worth recording.
I was, as usual, sitting across from my mother while she told the story. I was, as usual, producing the appropriate responses. I was, as usual, half-listening, half-thinking about other things. The story was at the part where J takes credit for the piece of work. I was preparing the small disapproving noise I usually produce at this point.
And I happened, for some reason, to look at my mother’s face while she was telling it.
What I saw, in her face, was something I had not registered in the previous ninety-nine times I had heard the story. She was not, in any visible sense, performing the story. She was, in some way I did not have a clean word for, inhabiting the telling. Her face was lit up. Her eyes were moving rapidly between mine and the table. She was, at sixty-eight, about as alive in that moment as I had seen her in years.
The aliveness was not about J. The aliveness was about me. She was telling the story, and watching my face for the response, and the responsive face I was producing, even half-distractedly, was, for her, the entire point. She was not transmitting information. She was conducting a small, ongoing, ritual exchange of attention with her son. The story was the form. The exchange was the substance.
I sat with this for the rest of the telling. I produced my usual responses. I laughed at the punchlines. The story ended. My mother, satisfied, took a sip of her tea. She was, for that small moment after the telling, more relaxed than she had been when the telling started.
I had, for forty years, been producing the responses without understanding that the responses were the point. I had thought I was being a polite listener. I had been, in fact, providing the half of the ritual that made the ritual function. The story, by itself, did not produce closeness. The story plus my responses, performed together across forty years of family life, produced the only reliable form of closeness my mother and I had developed.
What this changed
I want to describe what changed in me, after I understood this, because the change is the article.
The first thing that changed is that I stopped, internally, dreading the J story. The dread had come from the assumption that the story was a piece of inefficient communication. If I already knew the information, the telling was a waste of my time. The waste of time was what I had been resenting, in low-grade fashion, for decades.
Once I understood that the story was not communication but ritual, the framing shifted entirely. Ritual is not measured by efficiency. Ritual is not made worse by repetition. Ritual is, in fact, often improved by repetition, because the repetition is part of what makes the ritual a ritual. The Catholic Mass is repetitive. The Friday night dinner is repetitive. The bedtime story for a child is repetitive. The repetition is not a flaw in these rituals. The repetition is the structure that allows the rituals to do their work.
My mother’s J story is, in this sense, a small private liturgy between the two of us. The liturgy gets performed, intermittently, throughout our adult lives. The performance produces a particular kind of closeness that nothing else we do produces. The closeness is, for both of us, valuable. The fact that I have heard the story a hundred times is not a problem. It is, in some real way, the point. A liturgy you’ve only heard once is not a liturgy. It’s a story.
The second thing that changed is that I started, for the first time, to listen to the story differently. Instead of half-listening for the content I already knew, I started paying attention to my mother. To her face. To the small variations in her telling. To the parts she emphasizes more this time than last time. To the slight changes in the punchline depending on how she’s feeling that day. The story, attended to in this way, is not the same story she told me in 1995. It is a slightly different story, every time, told by a slightly different version of her. The differences are small. The differences are also, when you look for them, the actual interesting thing.
The third thing that changed, and this is the most important, is that I started to think about all the other repeated stories my mother tells, and what they might be doing.
The other stories
I want to describe, briefly, what I started to notice once I had understood the J story.
My mother has, in active rotation, somewhere between fifteen and twenty repeated stories. The story about her uncle and the car. The story about the time she got lost in Edinburgh. The story about my father proposing to her, which she tells differently from how my father tells it. The story about the cat they had when I was small. The story about the neighbor who stole her parking spot. The story about her first day of work in 1968.
I had, for years, treated these stories as a kind of background noise. They came up, periodically, in family conversation. I produced the appropriate responses. I waited for the topic to change.
What I now understand is that these stories are, collectively, the architecture of my mother’s relationship with me. They are the small set of shared objects that she and I have built up over forty years. The shared objects are how she experiences closeness with me. When she tells me the story about the cat, she is not telling me about the cat. She is performing a small piece of our shared history, in front of an audience that knows the history, and the performance is the closeness.
This means, among other things, that when I produce the appropriate responses, I am not being a polite listener. I am being a co-participant in the ritual that constitutes our relationship. The responses are not optional. The responses are the half of the relationship that I am responsible for. If I stop producing them—if I started, hypothetically, to wave away the J story with a “I’ve heard this one before”—I would not be saving us both time. I would be, in some real way, refusing to participate in the relationship. The relationship is, in some real way, the rituals.
This is sobering. It is also, I think, useful information. It tells me that the next forty years of my relationship with my mother, if she lives that long, will largely consist of these rituals being performed and re-performed in various rooms. It tells me that my job, as her son, is to be a willing participant in the rituals, not a passive audience for them. It tells me that the J story, when it comes up next month, is not a chore. It is an invitation.
What I’d say to anyone reading this
I want to write directly to anyone who has an aging parent who tells the same stories over and over.
You may be operating, as I was, on the assumption that the stories are a piece of communication. That the parent is telling them to inform you. That the repetition is a sign of cognitive softening or social inefficiency.
I’d suggest a different frame. The stories are probably not communication. The stories are probably ritual. The ritual is your parent’s way of producing closeness with you. The repetition is not a flaw. The repetition is the form.
The next time the story comes up, instead of half-listening for content, try paying attention to your parent. Watch their face. Listen to the variations. Notice what the story is, in this iteration, doing for them. The thing it is doing, almost certainly, is producing closeness with you. The closeness is being produced by both of you, in real time, through the small collaborative performance of a story you have both heard before.
Your parent will not live forever. The stories will, at some point, stop being told. When that day comes, you will, in my best understanding, miss them. You will miss them in a way that has nothing to do with the information content of the story and everything to do with the small ritual presence of your parent’s voice telling you something both of you already know.
The stories are the relationship. The relationship is the stories. The hundredth telling is, in some real way, the most important telling of all, because it is the telling closest to the day when there will not be another one.
I sat with my mother last Sunday and listened to the J story. I will sit with her again, soon, and listen to it again. The next time, I will pay attention. The time after that, I will pay attention more. For the rest of her life, however much of it remains, I am going to try to be the audience the story has, all along, been waiting for. Not the polite audience. The real one. The one that understands what the story is for.
The story, it turns out, was never about J. The story has, all along, been about me and my mother sitting in a kitchen, in slightly different versions of ourselves at slightly different ages, doing the only thing the two of us have ever quite known how to do together, which is laugh in the right places at a story we both already know.
That, I now think, is enough. That is, in fact, almost everything.
