Once Upon a Time....

When I was a child I was taught, as I’m sure were many others, that there were magic words that one must use to have a good life. If I wanted to be excused from the table, or have a cookie fresh from the oven, or to stay up a little past my bedtime, the magic word “please” made it more likely that my wish would be granted, particularly if followed up by some other incantations such as “thank you”. There were words that I learned would soften tension and anger: “I’m sorry” or “please excuse me” and since I grew up in the American South, a timely sprinkling of “ma’am” or “sir” helped a lot too.

When I became a parent, I learned another magical phrase. Or perhaps I always knew it was magical since most fairy tales began that way. But my sense of magic had tarnished a bit over the years. Then one evening in a long checkout line, after a very tiring day, with an infant in a sling sucking on my shirt in hungry frustration, and an overtired toddler and a perpetually inquisitive preschooler sentenced to the shopping cart, I learned the magic in the phrase itself.

Just as the tears and screams were about to erupt, some inner wisdom from a sympathetic parental muse made me blurt out, “Once upon a time…” My four year old was surprised away from hurt feelings at being told that he couldn’t go explore and my two year old looked up from the box of cereal he was about to gnaw on. The momentary silence was bliss, but sure to be short-lived unless I came up with something quick.

“Once upon a time, there was a store that was built on top of the home of a sad dinosaur.” (My kids loved dinosaurs.)

“No, Mommy,” my older son said kindly. “Remember that dinosaurs lived a long time ago.” His younger brother nodded, though I’m not sure he actually understood the point.

“Oh, you’re right,” I acknowledged. “But then, whose home was it? It was something big and rumbly. No one had actually seen it, but they’d heard it and it made kind of a roar.”

“Oh, it was probably a dragon then,” said the little kid ahead of us in line. I glanced at my son, who had a vivid imagination as long as it didn’t contradict his scientific scholarship. He looked thoughtful and then agreed that it probably was a dragon.

For what seemed like hours, but was probably only twenty minutes, we wove a story. When mental fatigue threatened to silence me (or I needed to distract my cardboard chewer in the shopping cart with something acceptably edible) my older son, nearby children, and occasionally even another parent chimed in with their contributions to it. It kept everyone occupied enough that the waiting didn’t seem onerous and the sense of being overwhelmed was banished. I could discreetly untwist my shirt from under the sling to let the baby soothe her hunger pangs as a little girl behind us gave a verbal footnote to explain a potential point of contention. Her father continued the story for the others after I checked out and for all I know the tale of the dragon under the grocery store is still going on today.

The magic of Once Upon a Time has rescued us from excessive whining when waiting for late buses, distracted from terror during visits to doctors when immunizations were due, and long car rides when legs were cramped and bladders were full. It has chased away noisy nocturnal monsters lurking in dark corners and became a required bedtime ritual for my perpetually insomniac younger son. Long after his siblings had fallen asleep, he’d lie awake restlessly and unable to relax. I told him stories until his hyperkinetic mind slowed down and his muscles stopped wanting to jump, twist, or wiggle. I was my household’s Scheherazade but instead of telling stories in order to save my life, I told them to save our sleep. Sometimes, I must confess, I must have fallen asleep mid-tale, but it worked out even so. My rule was that I would only tell bedtime stories to someone lying in bed, so he’d wait there for me to stir a little, and then pat my face to whisper, “And then what, Mommy?”

I never knew where a story was going to go when I embarked upon one. It might follow recent events, or thoughts and feelings that fermented during the day and bubbled up when the lights went out, or lessons that needed to be learned in a kind and encouraging way. The less successful stories were those where I rushed things or was too preachy or preoccupied with my own thoughts rather than the narrative. Those stories were met with protests or questions or heightened restlessness. Very interactive stories were fine for daytime, but the best stories for night were those where there was enough to engage the mind but allow it to rest. After a brief interaction to paint the imaginary storyscape together, it was only the storytelling and the quiet listening until sleep came.

During one drowsy rambling tale, serendipity brought us the magic of the “dreamseed” when it emerged as a verbal footnote to answer a “but how did?” point of contention in the universe. From that point on, dreamseeds were a part of our nightly ritual. I may have subconsciously borrowed the idea from David James Duncan and the “dreamfee” from his book The River Why, but I don’t know. They weren’t exactly the same things, but they each helped get a restless and imaginative child to sleep. Our version began with a request by the listener-dreamer for a story about a particular theme or event and hear just enough of it to sow it in the sleepy mind. If the listener stayed relaxed with eyes closed, Bedtime Story Magic would turn it into a good dream.

I was encouraged from time to time to write stories down, but I was never good at it. I found I needed focused time without interruptions to do so and with work and needs of the family, I didn’t have enough of it. If I had to choose between writing and sleeping (or even reading), I seldom chose writing. And even when I did, writing feverishly one day, and then going back the next to try to decipher my handwriting to correct flaws of flow or grammar before writing the next segment, I was never satisfied. Things are better in the brain, I decided. Adaptations are endless there and what’s written was too static. Tangents and links in a mental story were expected and wonderful, but a confusing muddled mess when written down. I was embarrassed enough at the results not being what I wished that during one moment of anxiety, I happened to ask my husband, “If I died suddenly in a car wreck or something like that, would you promise me that you’ll throw all my writing drafts away without reading them?” He’d always respected my privacy and hadn’t looked at them and was unlikely to read my handwriting even if he tried. He pointed that out, but I was so distressed at the idea of anyone seeing something so half done and so full of errors that when he finally said that he didn’t think that was a promise he could make, I nodded in understanding and then quietly destroyed everything myself. I didn’t write anything else for years.

When the compulsion to create stories and worlds became irresistible again, we had a computer and a keyboard. But the stories still came in a Once Upon a Time framework and the narrative voice was meant for being spoken aloud. In my first drafts, it was almost entirely dialogue, with little indication of who said what because I assumed I would be the reader and I knew already. But as a few segments were shared here and there, mainly with those who were exhausted until they got in bed and then were wide awake, I revised them based on the feedback. There were still stories tucked into other stories, wandering off on tangents and backstories to speak to more grownup questions, worries, and fears. There was no real end in mind other than to provide more interesting topics of conversations than what was in the news, or to give an alternate prospective to find a way off the cultural war battlefield, or at the very least, to plant dreamseeds into tired minds and let Bedtime Story Magic do its work. (In fact, until just a few years ago, the Sanctuary series was called Cure for Insomnia because it really was designed to read here and there at bedtime when sleep was elusive and one’s monkey mind needed to think about something entirely different.)

I still cringe when reading over something that I wrote and see word substitutions, inadvertent misspellings or verbs omitted even after I proofread them several times. It seems to happen more often now in the digital age, but I’ve learned to be more forgiving of it in myself and others. Our brains are changing to adapt to their new environment and no doubt our language and stories will evolve along with them. That’s both sad and exciting. I used to worry that these increasing errors meant that I had Alzheimer’s or something. I worried that I would be stuck in a prison of my own mind. But then, as I wrote to my older son when he was ready to graduate and leave home, I had a memory of years of bedtime stories. He’d shared a room with his restless younger brother and a thousand stories had worked their way into his sleepy brain. I imagined those memories altered, I wrote to him, and with me someday in a chair by the window or confined to a bed feeling anxious and afraid, but not knowing why. And then I imagined him a gentle stranger with magic of his own, who would sit close by, but not too close to frighten me, and say “Once Upon a Time….”