Your Story Is Love

: Featured on Ignatian Solidarity Just Parenting column :

My 6-year-old came home from school the other day and asked me, “Do you want to play M.A.S.H.?” 

“Wow,” I thought to myself, “so this is where we are already. Wasn’t I 8 or 9 before I learned to play M.A.S.H.?” 

M.A.S.H., for the uninformed, is a simple game played with paper and pencil where one lists possibilities for each of a few areas: future career, future spouse, future mode of transportation, and future home style, which makes the acronym: Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House. 

Yes, friends, the capitalist, heteronormative, patriarchy reaches its claws in whereever it can get them. I played M.A.S.H. 35 years ago on the opposite coast when there was no internet. It persists. 

Anyway, curious to know more about what she knew about MASH, I agreed to play. 

She knew the deal exactly—list your choices, count them down, cross them off. 

But the most gleeful part of the process for her, I soon realized, was the ending. Every time we’d play, she’d jump up and down shouting, “Tell me my story! Tell me my story, Mommy!” 

“How important it is to tell stories and to tell them on purpose. We need to be so careful in the stories we tell and the stories in which we believe.” ~Molleen Dupree-Dominguez

This phrasing caught me. 

“Tell me my story.” 

How important it is to tell stories and to tell them on purpose. We need to be so careful in the stories we tell and the stories in which we believe.

Read the rest at JustParenting on Ignatian Solidarity Network.

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