Write to this Prompt: What are the Top Stories in your Family to Tell?

My therapist said that telling kids their family stories gives them a sense of control and helps them be better emotionally when they grow up. I don’t know a lot of the family stories because I was a youngest child and was pretty clueless about what was going on, but here are some half-memories and tidbits that I know:

In my husband's family, his grandfather escaped from being a prisoner of war and lived off of wild turnips and onions. Why does it feel like I am mixing up this story with that movie Holes?

My great grandfather got drunk and arrested and died from a head injury in jail, leaving my great grandmother alone with five kids, plus my dad to raise. They say she spit on the sheriff’s grave when he died because he wouldn’t take him to the hospital when he was hurt. These are uplifting.

My mom’s mom, Mildred Lou, watched her dad drown. My mom’s grandmother, my great grandmother hung herself and my mom and grandmother found her. My great grandmother’s mom was said to have killed herself by sticking her head in the oven. I don't know if that’s real. I don’t really get how that would work, but the story was that she killed herself because my great-grandmather’s sister got pregnant when she wasn’t married. Then the daughter died during childbirth anyway. On the bright side she didn’t have to like in the hospital with a frozen pad--or padsicle as the pros call them-- icing down her perineum. The only upside to childbirth mortality.

My sister Jenny broke my sister Trudy’s back in a wrestling (or wrastling) match.

These stories are going to really cheer my kids up and give them resilience. Yay!

Once I threw a full can of Pepsi at the back of my sister Katie’s head while she was driving. Once she was giving me a ride to piano lessons and I was drinking a glass of milk but we got there really fast and I was only half done with the milk. I didn’t want to chug it, so I threw the milk out the window except I forgot the window was still rolled up and it just splashed all over the car and I needed windshield wipers for my glasses.

I had a party when I was in high school and these cute skateboarders stole all my lightbulbs so I had to go begging my friends for money to try to replace them before my parents came home. I showed up crying at my friend Derek's house, who is now a conservative politician in Kansas. At first, he thought I was crying and begging for money because I needed an abortion, but luckily I just needed light bulbs. .