The Story You Stopped Questioning

Today is Mother's Day. And before we go one word further, I want to say this.

To the mothers of humans, the mothers of dogs, cats, birds, fish, parakeets, and whatever else you are keeping alive in your home right now, this one is for you. To the women who mother without the title, the aunts, the neighbors, the friends who show up, the women who have been mothering everyone around them for decades and nobody thought to give them a card, this one is for you too. To the women for whom today is complicated, the ones who lost their mothers, the ones who wanted children and are somewhere else in that story, the ones whose relationship with their mother is the whole reason they are reading this right now, you are not forgotten today either.

Happy Mother's Day. And Happy Mothers Day, no apostrophe, no s, for everyone else who does not fit the Hallmark definition but shows up anyway.

Now. About those stories.

My family has a story about me. I was the athletic one. And my little brother was the smart one.

Now that the first part is not wrong. I was athletic. That is documented. What I want to talk about is the other part. The smart one. Because nobody ever said to me, Bonnie, you are not the smart one. Nobody sat me down and delivered that verdict. Not my parents, not my teachers, not my brother. But the inference was there. In the grades. In what got celebrated at the dinner table and what got a nod. In the way the adults in my life looked at my little brother when he explained something and looked at me when I ran faster than the boys in the neighborhood.

And I, being a child with no other frame of reference, filled in the blanks. He was the smart one. I was the athletic one. Those were two separate categories. One of us got each one.

I carried that story for a long time. I will be honest, I am probably still carrying pieces of it. I believe a lot of the reason I am in school right now, at 63, slogging through an undergraduate degree while working full-time, is that some quiet part of me is still trying to close a gap that may not have existed in the first place.

Here is what is funny. Not that long ago, I actually had a conversation with my little brother about this. And he looked at me, very articulately, and told me he never thought that at all. Never. He always thought I was very smart. Just in a different way than him.

I had been carrying a story for decades that was not even the story the other person was telling. I just filled in the blanks myself, with the best data a kid could gather, and then I stopped questioning my own interpretation.

That is the thing about the stories: we stop questioning. Nobody had to say the thing out loud for it to land. The data seemed clear enough. The room seemed to confirm it. And once we reached our conclusion, we never went back to ask whether we had read the data correctly.

Your version of this story is probably not about being the smart one or the athletic one. It is about something else. The pretty one. The responsible one. The funny one. The difficult one. The one who tries hard but. The one who is a lot. You have your word. You know exactly what it is. You have been delivering on it for decades without once asking whether it was accurate in the first place.

I want to sit with this one question this week.

What story have you been carrying that nobody ever actually told you?

Not the ones said to your face. The ones you pieced together from the evidence available. The ones that seemed so obvious nobody had to say them out loud.

Those are the stubborn ones. Not because they hurt the most. Because we never thought to question them.

Mine surprised me. Yours might too.

Happy Mother's Day. Happy Mother Day. Happy Sunday. I will see you here next week, on my birthday, which is a whole separate situation we will get to when we get to it.

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The Returning Project is a space where women reclaim who they truly are, beyond who they were told to be. New posts every Sunday.

Inward. Onward. Go.