The Story Hour by Thrity Umigar

 "Every year when I stands first in my class, Ma gives me the advice: Daughter, she say, never be gamandi.  What you have, given to you by God.  You just a basket into which God puts the flowers.  Flowers not belong to you.  They belongs to God.  Same way, your clever belong to God."

What a beautifully written story.  I didn't want it to end. A book of friendship where good people make mistakes for either reasons they believe are altruistic or for reasons they cannot explain.  People who tell their stories to gain understanding from the listener and end up acquiring a new understanding and subsequent forgiveness from themselves.  I loved these new friends of mine and I wanted them to end their stories in places of reconciliation and acceptance.

 The book ends with a 3-page essay: "The Story Behind the Story Hour".  If you are reading my blog and I have somehow inspired your interest in this book then I want you to know that you need to finish the book with this essay. 

 I'm borrowing these thoughts and words to inspire others and myself to think more fully of my son and others with Developmental Language Disorder and Apraxia.

"As someone who has been accused of talking even to lampposts, one of my greatest fears is finding myself in a country where I do not speak the language.  I can’t imagine how lonely and terrifying that would be.  I make my living in words, and I believe that it is through language that we make our humanity known to each other.

...in every sense, every hour of our lives is a story hour.  As human beings, we think, dream, and communicate in narrative.  Our stories are what define us and individualize us.  Without our stories we are anonymous, faceless, a row of empty suits hanging from a rack.  It is our stories that make us irreducibly, defiantly, and incessantly human.”

And, I’m thinking of Zupe here and hearing that the stories we tell not only ourselves but OTHERS is what makes US human to them.  How easy is it to discount the intelligence, worth, and humanity of a person who cannot share with equal ease, convenience, and accessibility his story.

And this quote is just for me as I find my current story so difficult.  “We all begin with a story of ourselves that we believe to be true.  But perhaps true personal change, even healing, can only happen when we change that narrative, when we begin to tell ourselves and others a different story."