Millie Creightonresponded. I explained I thought I had heard that her family was Chris-
tian in a previous session when she had also mentioned growing up
in Hiroshima. “Oh no,” she clarified, “my mother. My mother was
a Christian, not me.”
The yarn begins in this way. It is the story of this instructor as a young
girl, growing up as the child of a woman who became a devoted Chris-
tian in a place where Christians were unusual, and a place where be-
ing unusual was not valued. As she grew into her teens, she developed
a rebellious resentment toward the mother because of the mother’s
“difference,” a difference she focused on as her mother’s being Chris-
tian. As she tells the story, she remembers—regretfully now—being
embarrassed by her mother. This typical identity story of adolescent
and youth conflict toward one’s parent is resolved in the typical way.
The daughter goes on to mentally explore more and more the moth-
er’s life reality. As she does so, she recognizes the mother’s strengths,
given the situations and circumstances of life with which she had to
deal. Coming to a new understanding of her, the daughter replaces
the resentment toward the mother with a new sense of appreciation,
based on her better understanding of the context of life in which the
mother was caught. Instead of rejection, she ends up satisfied, and
even proud to have had this mother, to have been her daughter. Al-
though a typical story of a youthful identity crisis, resolved in a typ-
ical way, the details were not so typical.
As the story continues, it begins to shift away a bit. The story of the
mother, rather than of the woman (my teacher) telling it, now becomes
the focus of the story. She became a Christian after the atomic bomb-
ing. For a long time, the daughter could only think of such a conver-
sion as a desperate attempt to grasp something that offered meaning,
and cling to it, after an incredibly destructive event. Perhaps it was
so, the response to a desperate need by a woman for whom meaning
had been shattered. As the story continues, I notice that another shift
has occurred in the telling of it. It is no longer even the story of the
teller’s mother, but is now the story of “a woman.” What started as
the instructor’s story had become a story about her mother and had
now turned into the story about a woman who went through a very
profound experience in life, that deeply touched—too deeply—her-
self and those she loved.