Re-framing Old Stories and Writing New Ones

Do you remember your first day of school?  I do. I have a flashback of a little girl standing all alone underneath the wooden stairs that led to the classrooms above.  My parents had said goodbye to me on the other side of the flooded river that cut our farm off from the local township and school.  Prior to school starting they sent me to board with another family we knew from church, who lived in town.  They reminded me that our family friend and neighbour was a teacher at the same school. She crossed the flooded river just like me, in a ‘duck’-an amphibious modified truck. 

I was four years old when I started school. I turned five the week after.  As long as I can remember I was the ‘big girl’ of the family.  I never had much of a chance to be a baby, as my first sister was born a year later and by the time I turned four, I had another sister and a baby brother.  I accepted the mantle of being the responsible older sister and a good girl, very early in my life.  This was expected of me when I started school. 

My sister started school the following year. The same river was flooded.  This time though, my mother rented a house in town until the floods abated.  She shared that house with another church family and neighbour.  This time four children started school; two for the first time.

They say children are keen observers, but poor interpreters.  (Rudolph Dreikurs) I observed that the year I started school I was sent to board with almost strangers. The year my sister started school, mum rented a house with friends.  What I interpreted though was different.  I believed that I was not special enough for my family to rent a house.  I found out decades later that my parents could not afford to rent a house by themselves.  The family my mother shared with had recently arrived in town and at our church.  Their eldest two children were the same age as my sister and me.  Their second child was also starting school for the first time that year.  Combined, both families could afford to rent a house.  The story I told myself for all those years was not entirely correct. 

I have other stories in my past that have also shaped what I believe about myself and the roles I have played.  I wonder how many other stories I have misinterpreted?    

Standing at the threshold or maybe even having crossed it into my ‘second act’ or ‘last act’ of my life here on earth, I want my stories from hereon to be different.  I am tired of always being the responsible one and the ‘good girl’. I have overdone that role to the point of enabling and exhaustion! 

What I have come to understand is it is not so much about making external changes and trying harder with new behaviours, but rather it is an internal shift.  It is time to re-frame some of those stories and start living out the new and truer ones; from a deep place. 

I also belong to a far bigger story that calls me into a relationship with my Creator and Redeemer.  My identity is based on His truth about who I am and who He is calling me into being.  For someone who has taken on much more responsibility than was ever necessary, it is liberating to know that I am not walking this journey alone.  And it is time to leave some of that baggage behind as I write new stories.  

I would love to hear from you how you have re-framed old stories and what new ones are you writing?