R12| Monday, November 16, 2020 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
F
or many years, whenever I saw the words
“lemon meringue pie” in a cookbook or on a
menu, I would be reminded of my mother’s
favorite no-bake pie recipe, the one that in-
cluded only three ingredients and tasted like
a chemical smoothie.
Her devotion to this truly awful dish fre-
quently came up in my conversations with
friends about the odd things our parents did
when we were growing up. The anecdotes I contributed
over several decades became part of my virtual family al-
bum—an often critical, sometimes humorous portrait of
the two people at its center.
Things are different now. I am retired, my children
are grown, and I tend to spend as much time thinking
about the past as I do about the days ahead. Given an
opportunity to reset the stories I once told about my
parents—what they liked,how they behaved, the deci-
sions they made—I have found narratives that are less
one-dimensional and that reveal genuine insights into
their lives and my own.
The most obvious example is food. My mother reliedevents that eclipsed the earlier nar-
rative. Until now.
In retelling the story of a man
who remained in the shadows for
most of my life, my preteen years
have become more prominent. I re-
member as a young girl jumping into
my father’s lap on those evenings he
sat in our den after work, my body
sprawled across his chest while his
hand patted me absent-mindedly on
my back, the way one might pat a
puppy that has bounded up looking
for hugs. But he did listen and nod
as I rattled on about school and my
report card and the poem I had writ-
ten for my teacher.
Now, as a parent, I can appreciate
that his attentiveness gave me self-
confidence, a sense that I was smart,
that doing well in school was some-
thing he approved of, that I was
loved. As the third of four children, I
reveled in that assurance, weightless
as it might have been to him.
These days I focus less on the
story of his disappearance and more
about the time I took music lessons
for a few months on the small or-
gan in our living room. I think
about how he signed on for lessons,
too, and how we sat next to each
other on the bench trying out dif-
ferent chords. His travel schedule
meant he couldn’t keep up, but his
intention was all I needed to feel
special, happy that we were doing
something together.
In previous years, the narrative
about my parents was intended to
distance myself from them, to en-
sure that my life would be different
from theirs. I see now that there was
never the need to push them away,
only to better understand their own
challenges and how they helped
shape the person I have become.
It feels good to have rewritten
these stories. I hope my own chil-
dren do the same when they tell, in
later life, their stories about us. In
the meantime, I am knitting a large,
multicolored Amish throw, and I am
always happy to serve up my favor-
ite vegetable dip. It has just two in-
gredients: soy sauce and mayon-
naise. It’s always a winner.Ms. Shellis a writer in Philadelphia.
Email:[email protected]. SERGE BLOCHJOURNAL REPORT|ENCORE
I was 10, she invited a boy
from a school for the blind to
spend an afternoon with us.
The child sat on a couch in the
living room, head down, rock-
ing silently back and forth.
None of us had a clue what to
say or how to play with some-
one who couldn’t see.
In the story I told about
these episodes, I described
them, critically, as examples of
my mother’s unpredictable be-
havior, impulsive acts that dis-
rupted our household routines.
Now I view things differ-
ently. It wasn’t about us; it was
about my mother gathering in
neglected “others.” If she didn’t
change the course of anyone’s
life, at the very least she influ-
enced my own. I realize now
that the person-to-person ways
I have chosen to be involved in
my community reflect back on
her compassion for others. Re-
membering that compassion, seeing
once again the blind child on our
couch, is the new narrative.
Gardening was another topic up for
review. I used to think of my mother’swork in the garden as “puttering.” All
of these activities seemed so boring—
designed to keep women occupied
when there were so many more pro-
ductive things they could be doing.
This story has changed, too. I un-
derstand now my mother’s embrace of
an activity that offered immediate
gratification, demanding only her at-
tentiveness at a time when the expec-
tations she had once held for her later
years were being slowly upended. The
flowers, the ground coverings, the
honeybees, all held steady for her, re-
turning every spring just as they do in
my own suburban garden.
My father is harder to fit into this
revisionist history. He was an insur-
ance executive and traveled almost
every week, and in my late teen years
he left the family. I followed his life
post-us—an unhappy sequence ofon quick and easy meals: the casse-
roles she froze for months before ex-
huming them for dinner; the no-fuss
pie mentioned above that I would
toss down the disposal when she
wasn’t looking; the TV dinners that
came with goopy mashed potatoes
and gelatinous gravy cordoned off
from meat that looked like cat food.
Thinking back, the context
should have been obvious. She had
four children and very little time to
do anything creative in the kitchen,
let alone prepare appetizing meals.
But she did something that I now
realize was better: She livened up
our dinners with the Reader’s Di-
gest vocabulary quiz, challenging
me, my father and my siblings to
choose the right definition of each
word and then spell it. I recognize
now that these dinners were where
I developed a love of words.
Another narrative centered on
my mother’s occasional social invi-
tations to local children she consid-
ered needy or disadvantaged. WhenMaybe My Parents
Weren’t Really So Bad
For years, my stories about them
had a negative tingeBYROBBIESHELLIt feels good to have
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