Inside the Burls: Who Owns the Story?

This is Part 4 of my series exploring burls as a metaphor for the complexity of family trees today. After looking at the power of telling a family story, we now turn to who owns the story.

Our guest writer, Kerri Kearney joins us for the fourth in her series for the Projectkin Members’ Corner. These posts celebrate family history storytelling — in all its forms. You can contribute stories to the Members’ Corner, too. Learn more here.

A 100-year old incense cedar tree stands as an example with burls for eyes and peeling bark for a nose. Wind catches a lantern.

In my first three posts, I introduced tree burls as a metaphor for the unexpected twists and turns in family trees. Though sometimes unwanted, these natural anomalies often hide beauty. Burls appear in family trees when we depart from “ideal” social norms, such as growing a family through adoption or surrogacy or changes caused by divorce, remarriage, or a child conceived through an affair. These and other instances spin family branches off in unexpected ways. 

My first post introduced the concept; my second described sharing the burl in a family tree through stories; and my third post introduced sharing stories as profoundly important tools to families.

Burls as Beautiful, Part 1

“Storying” Burls, Part 2

Burl Stories as Tools, Part 3

In this final post of the series, I move behind the scenes of storytelling for children and teens to ponder a fundamental question: Who owns a story?

Our lives are intertwined with people, places, and times. These elements factor into how we “story” our families. Burls often represent the complicated circumstances or even secrets lurking in the shadows. A critical consideration in sharing these stories is appreciating the affected characters.

For example, the children’s book I described in part 2 told the origin story of our daughter, who came to us through adoption. I thought of the story as her story. I wrote it for her, but the story included other important actors: her biological mother, my husband, and our other two children.

Was it my right to tell a story in which aspects of their lives were revealed?

I honestly don’t know. Even in research, which has numerous rules to protect individuals, privacy in storytelling (which often provides data for research) is a murky and much-discussed question.

While there are multiple positions people take on this question, let me share my take on three of them:

1. “You own your stories. To tell or not to tell is your decision.”

2. “Share only with permission. No one should be writing about others without their explicit permission.”

3. “It’s messy and bears careful consideration every time.” 

1. You own your stories.

I believe that each of us owns our stories. But telling our stories rarely impacts only us. For instance, an individual who tells the story of how she experienced her parents’ divorce is highly likely to reveal her “truth” about both parents, who they remarried, and others who may have been involved. Putting those stories “out there,” especially with no warning to the other characters, is likely to create conflict, embarrassment, anger, and other negative responses within and sometimes outside the family. 

I have a bonus (or chosen) family member who had children with his second wife. She insisted that their children never know he was married before her. (Perhaps this assumes that neither of the children become genealogists!) As a result, telling a family story that reveals his first marriage may have a profound impact on his marriage and children that could affect essential trust relationships. Compounding the problem, his first marriage and divorce also involved extended family members as characters.

Thus, you can see how the stance of “we own our stories” suggests that extended family members could incidentally include his first marriage in a story without regard to the potential fallout for his family. Many people who take this stance have remaining negative emotions about what happened or are “truthtellers,” rigidly adhering to telling the truth regardless of the consequences for the people involved. Have you experienced this?

2. Only with Permission

I also consider this position to be extreme. My resistance to it is likely because I dislike family secrets. This position allows an individual or individuals to insist that important family stories remain secrets regardless of how the other characters feel or the potential consequences. Secrets in the family typically exist because of fear or shame. Some family secrets can become quite toxic. 

For example, a friend of mine found out she was conceived through rape when she was in her early 50s. The truth helped her understand the distanced relationship she had growing up with her biological mother. It not only prevented her from building ties of trust with her mother and but also undermined her relationships with other family members who’d known the secret. The consequence was an upheaval in her identity that compounded frayed relationships with anger and resentment.

There is never a good time to tell an origin story that includes rape. However, I believe that keeping this secret for so long prevented my friend from being able to process it as a part of her identity and heal much earlier in her life. This “burl” was a closely-held family secret. I wonder what would have happened if the seeds of her story had been planted early in her life so that she could have asked the questions across time and as she was ready?

3. It’s Messy.

Being human is messy, and families are incredibly messy. What to tell and when are fundamental decisions. I believe that to the extent that stories affect others, you have to balance the toxicity of secrets and honoring truth. 

One of the problems I have with keeping family secrets is that they create façades out of personal stories. Soon, we’re leading lives that are not our own. It makes it seem as though we never made mistakes—big or small. No one ever sees the hardships that affected us or how we overcame them. We always did it perfectly the first time. We’ve successfully fought off all of the villains in every story.

That story is never true, but pretending it puts a lot of pressure on children, grandchildren, and other younger family members when they’ve only ever heard half of the person’s story. It creates unattainable standards, and makes young adults may feel like failures, never measuring up to an expected standard of perfection.

Is that really what we want for our families?

My own story

It has never been my wish to hurt others or make others uncomfortable by what I choose to reveal. This respect for others is part of my story. 

I am a survivor of an extreme case of post-partum depression that ran undiagnosed and unchecked for well over a year. We don’t often talk about post-partum depression in polite society because it contrasts too sharply with closely held ideals about mothers. It is hidden under an accusation every mother fears: the bad mother. You see it magnified by media reports of women with post-partum psychosis who kill or endanger their children. 

Because I work in a space with a strong history of insisting that women choose between having children and professional success, I felt it was vital for me and other women to share our stories. I chose to be unashamed of my experience, and, in doing so, worked to neutralize any attempt to undermine my credibility by revealing it as a secret.

However, my post-partum depression did much relational damage within my family. Telling my story involved other characters – my husband, children, parents, and sister. I knew I would have support and understanding from some, but certainly not from others. My PPD was a source of shame for some in the story. 

I chose to write my story anyway.

I wrote letters to each family member from whom I expected negative responses to explain why and what I hoped to achieve through writing it. I included details about where it would be published, and a copy of the article. None of those family members ever chose to discuss it with me, but I was at peace with my decision and still am for two crucial reasons.

First, if one of my daughters or my nieces developed PPD, I wanted her to know she was not alone. I didn’t want her to see it as a mothering failure. Second, through my story, I was insisting that women’s bodies should never be a source of shame in patriarchal workplaces like mine.

I am not proposing that my decision or how I handled it is right for every situation or every person. I hope it demonstrates my position of avoiding family secrets while considering and respecting the feelings of others.

I hope this post provides food for thought. I want it to openly acknowledge the complexities that can come with family storytelling, sometimes, and—most significantly—for family tree “burls.”

How about your story?

As I noted in my last post, family storytellers are immensely responsible for deciding what stories will live on after they’re gone. We often decide what to tell and what to “forget.” Too frequently, once something is seen in print, it is considered absolute truth.

The responsibility of keeping stories comes with great power. It is also high-stakes and messy. Let’s continue this meaningful conversation. Join me in the conversation below, or send me a message.

Explore Kerri’s contributions to the Projectkin Community Forum, including this Family Burls series, our book publishing event, plus her Project Recipes.

Would you be interested in joining us here in the Members’ Corner with a piece of your own? We’d love to share your work, too.