Hurricanes & Blizzards as Family Histories

As I write this blog entry, there are emails zipping across the airwaves and Twitter users across the country are tweeting about Hurricane Irene. Expressions of awe that a storm system could be as large as Europe, expressions of care for those who may be in harm's way, safety warnings (don't enter water if there are downed power lines), and motherly advice: Kids are never too old for Moms to stop worrying, so no matter your age, let your Mom know you're okay.

I have a suggestion for a combination historical marking of Hurricane Irene and educational exercise for young and old: Journaling.

Today, I sent this message to my son's Vermont college where they're all hunkered down in Hurricane mode (he's on campus early for residential adviser training):

Suggest you have these students journal during this storm and put entries together in a collection both as a recording of an historical event of Landmark College, plus the students could use journaling as an exercise in memorializing an historical event in their own lives.

For stranded vacationers/travelers with high school students, ask them to write down what was fun/not fun about their challenges in trying to get home. Ask them what they think about how the Odyssey documented the challenges Odysseus faced in trying to return home. What are some of their thoughts and challenges in getting home during Irene that you'd tell your own children when you are parents? They may not be able to think of anything right away, so you may have to start out. Don't remember much about Odysseus? Go online with your kids and look it up on Wikipedia.org

Too young to write well? When my own children were young, after a particularly fun day or a particularly challenging day, I'd ask each what was his favorite thing that happened, and what was the worst. Sometimes we'd write down these stories, with either older siblings or the parent being the scribe. It helps to put everything in perspective, too. Once, one of my sons said the best thing he did all day was to see the happy face of an older neighbor after my son shoveled the drifted snow from his walkway. While parenting is often fraught with uncertainty, I felt certain on that day that my son was learning empathy in a natural way.

Sad that you lived through Katrina but your family didn't journal? Use Irene as a kind of port-key (think Harry Potter) to take you back to that time. What were the best things you remember about Katrina, and how did you survive the hardest things. You see, sharing stories of surviving with your children helps to remind them of their family's resiliency to survive other challenges. Supporting families, supporting communities, should be what our country is all about.

Shared family and community events become part of your own story. Once when I was a young girl, (clean) water bubbled up through a floor drain in our basement. As kids, it was great fun playing the "Beckman bucketeers," repeatedly scooping water in buckets to dump into the laundry basin. I can still remember the soaking-wet olive-colored shirt I was wearing, which became a badge of my contribution to my family's clean-up efforts. During "show and tell" at school, I retold the story, laughing at the parts of the story where the water sloshed out of the sink and onto my shirt.

I learned that shared experiences and teamwork makes any job go more easily, even though it wasn't until I was an adult that I realized my how upset my parents must have been to have ankle-deep water in the basement. They never let on, preferring to help us believe we were essential in restoring the basement to its previous state.

In 1967, I was a young teen during Chicago's big blizzard. for four days, the city and suburbs essentially came to a standstill. Schools and businesses were closed, so parents hunkered down to survive and kids joined forces to make huge snow castles and gigantic snow people. It was a time before we knew about acid rain, so my mother made "snow ice cream" with a recipe she'd found years before. No one had a snowblower, but neighbors helped neighbors to shovel out driveways or push cars out of drifts, regardless of religious, ethnic, or political affiliations.

So, these stories became part of me, part of my family story. Every time we had a big snow when my own sons were young, I retold the stories of traveling to Mr. B's Fine Foods with a sled to get bread and milk.

What stories do you think your children will tell about Irene? Help them to document their own family history.