When others write your story: an unexpected gift

 There’s a story my parents have told many times: when I was little, I used to say, “When I grow up, I want to be a teacher and have 50 children. That way, I can open my own school and they will all study there.” I don’t really remember saying that, but I do remember wanting to be a teacher. I would line up my dolls in a neat row and "teach" them —sometimes school lessons, sometimes Bible school—but I was always the teacher. I also remember wanting a big family. Not fifty children, maybe, but for years I dreamed of having four kids. (Growing up in Guatemala City, most families had two or three children, so four felt like a lot.) Later on, I “changed my mind” and said I only wanted two. But my desire to teach never changed—and I still teach today, even if it’s outside a traditional classroom.

Today, that story came back to me unexpectedly. We were in a gathering of foster and adoptive families, and we were asked to do an activity: write a story in three paragraphs. Real or made up, any topic we wanted, but we had to stop after writing the first paragraph. For some reason, I remembered that childhood anecdote and my dream of having a big family (which, in a very different way than I imagined, came true). So I decided to write about that. The first paragraph came easily; I already knew the direction I wanted the story to take. But to my surprise, when we finished the first paragraph, the instruction was to hand our story to the person next to us and receive another one to write the second paragraph. I was sitting with a couple who are close friends—friends who are like family. We’ve shared many years, joyful seasons and hard ones, and our families know each other well. I loved the idea that the three of us would end up writing a paragraph for one another’s stories.

It was not an easy task. If the story had only three paragraphs, then the first introduced the story, the second needed a climax, and the third should wrap it up with a sort of “happy ending.” That part wasn’t in the instructions, but it’s what I had in mind to do justice to stories I didn’t know. Two interesting things happened: first, the stories I received were fiction, which gave me freedom but also the responsibility of making them “nice.” And second, I didn’t think about my own story at all. I assumed they would write something random or something cute… and forgot how well they know me, how quickly they would recognize the story was about me. When I received my story back, I was surprised and deeply moved. My friend—the dad—wrote the second paragraph, and his wife wrote the third. It was beautiful to see how they told my story through their own words, how they see me “from the outside,” and to remember that even when I think no one notices certain things, there are people who see, who understand, who know where I come from and where I hope to go.

Here is the photo of the story and the full text in English (since it's written in Spanish), so you can enjoy how my friends write.

"Once upon a time, there was a little girl who dreamed of having a large family. She prepared herself for having many children by teaching her toys, caring for (and helping care for) her younger sister and cousins, assisting the Sunday school teachers, and dreaming of becoming a teacher herself so she could teach her children about God.

She was always a dreamer, filled with the hopes of a large family, though she began to realize the challenges that her desire led her to doubt.

The little girl is now a woman who still dreams of having a large family. It's not just as she dreamed of as a child; it's even better, because God has blessed her with daughters, friends, and a community where she can show her love. This lovely woman is very thoughtful, and giving is her virtue."