Perspective and Narrative

Once a week, my wife and our older children are involved in activities with a youth group from our church. Our youngest and I stay home and we have “party night.”

He’s young, so party night typically consists of a trip to a convenience store to get some sugary treat then an evening of being silly together. A few weeks ago, we remixed part of the soundtrack of one of his favorite games using just our voices. (Neither one of us is an accomplished singer, by the way.) We laughed a lot and took a measure of pride in what we created. It was really bad, but we had so much fun doing it, and we learned a bit about how to use SoundBridge and OBS to mix audio then add it to a video.

I have five children whom I love very much. I feel like I have a fairly solid relationship with each of my kids. I hope that will always be the case. I imagine that is the hope for most parents.

I explained the concept of party night to a friend and he told me that those hours together will be a defining characteristic for my youngest for his entire life. Again, I certainly hope that’s the case.

Let’s step into the future a decade or so and look back with two different perspectives on party night from my youngest’s point of view. (This little exercise, of course, only represents two perspectives — from a vast number of possible perspectives — from which I cannot possibly extricate my own biases. It’s a flawed, but nonetheless instructional, exercise.)

Perspective #1

“When I was young, my dad was a busy guy. One night every week, he would come home from work and enthusiastically declare that it was ‘party night’. I would watch the clock anxiously until the time when my mom and older siblings would go to youth activities. Sometimes, even before they were gone, my dad and I would start our party.

“We’d go to the same convenience store every week and almost always get the same thing. Then we’d go home and do whatever I wanted: make videos, play basketball, play soccer, play video games, anything.

“Those are memories I’ll always cherish, and I love how my dad always spent that time with me.”

Perspective #2

“When I was young, my dad was a busy guy. Every week, he only gave me two hours of his time. He’d take me to the convenience store to get me something sugary which I blame for my current sugar-related health issues. We wasted literally hundreds of dollars when that money could have been put toward my future education. We wouldn’t do anything that defined my character; just play video games or some other waste of time. I knew he was just doing it so I would leave him alone the rest of the week because his work was always more important than his family, and that’s why I have so many problems.”

I’ve heard it said there are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. Even when the story is wildly different from what actually occurred, there’s often a grain of truth hidden in the narrative. When my older kids were young, I spent a lot of time working. There were times when I would leave for work before they got up in the morning and come home long after they had gone to bed. One year, for almost four months, I slept in my own bed almost every night but only saw my kids on the weekends, even though they were asleep in the room next door. That’s not something my youngest has experienced, but it doesn’t mean his own narrative couldn’t be influenced or established based on the experience of his older siblings.

This isn’t about the relationship I have with my children, however, but the power of perspective in our personal narrative. An abused child can find room to forgive parents and develop a civil relationship with them in adulthood. Their narrative can be about what they learned from their experiences and how those experiences have helped them help others who’ve faced similar circumstances.

Similarly, a child reared in a home approaching idyllic can reframe their upbringing as abusive, toxic, and the source of their adult issues.

It’s impossible for anyone to recount anything from their past in a purely objective manner because we will always see things through our own frameworks, worldviews, biases, and the thousands of experiences had across intervening years. There’s no other way to talk about our own lives. Even when we write about an experience as it happens (or shortly after), we will frame the experience using what we know and how we feel at the time. The experience might be colored again if we share it later in life when our perspective has shifted once more.

It’s okay. To be truly objective, you can only state the facts, and we are in possession of far fewer facts than we might think. True objectivity, in my estimation, is extremely boring (and candidly, impossible). We’re storytelling creatures who thrive on good stories. That’s why the best fiction and non-fiction stories are so sticky. We remember the stories because of the thoughts and emotions they evoke. Facts alone are no good at evoking emotion.

Our narrative will always be colored by our perspective. It can’t be any other way, and to fight it is pointless, but it’s still okay to color inside the lines.