Several years ago, when I was teaching memoir writing in an adult education program, the first exercise we’d do each term was called “Tell the Story of Your Name.”

"Who named you?," I’d ask my students. "How was your name chosen? Were you named after someone? Do you like your name? Have you ever changed your name?"

It was a comfortable way for novices to find an accessible entry into personal writing. They may have not felt ready yet to delve into complicated memories or intense emotions, but everyone could recount what their families had told them about the origins of their given name. (In my case, born to a high school teacher, I was named after Dad’s favorite student that year. The fact that I come from generations of lifelong Democrats and this particular 15-year-old Nancy happened to be a member of perhaps the country’s best-known Republican family didn’t bother my parents a whit, apparently.)

Not until recently did I think about whether we each have equally interesting memoir stories related to what other people call each other. Last week, my father was invited to give a talk at a local luncheon for senior citizens. Now long retired from teaching, he still enjoys the occasional public speaking opportunity, and my mother and I were both happy we could be in the audience that day.

A couple of minutes into the speech, my father began to cough mildly. He looked a few rows back to where my mother was sitting and called out, “Mum, could you hand me a glass of water?”

Mum, I thought to myself. Oh, dear. Now this audience of one hundred knows that my father sometimes – well, often – calls my mother “Mum.”

It was something I’d long been mildly embarrassed by. It had a certain Ronald Reagan ring to it, for one thing, and besides that it was just weird. No one else I know, other than parents of babies and toddlers who are trying to model the speaking habits they hope their small children will soon exhibit, refers to their spouse as “Mom” or “Dad.” The thought of calling my own husband “Dad” makes my skin crawl.

But I also remember a specific time when something happened that made this family quirk just a little less embarrassing. I was in college and a new friend had come home with me for the weekend. She heard my father say “Mum” and remarked wistfully, “My dad used to do that, before my parents got divorced. I miss that. Now he doesn’t call her anything directly, and when he refers to her to me, he says ‘Your mother.’”

Stories like this come up now and then when I’m working with memoir clients. I start with the same questions I gave my adult ed classes years ago: What were you named? Who named you that and why? But sometimes other stories emerge as well. An Italian immigrant in her eighties told me about how when she was growing up, every Italian family she knew has a son called Sonny. Another client said he saw it as an emblem of his complicated blended family that he had two half-brothers both named Robert.

For my part, it’s probably time for me to outgrow my adolescent embarrassment and accept my parents’ peculiar nomenclature habits.

Besides, despite what I feared, Dad doesn’t always call Mom “Mum.” When I told my sister about the speech, the cough, the glass of water, and the ensuing slip-up, she said, “Oh good; I’ll tell my kids that story. Because they once asked me if Dad calls Mom ‘Grandma’ even when there are no grandchildren around.”

So yes, what we are called matters to our story – and sometimes what other people are called becomes part of our story as well. Whether amusing, embarrassing, or just factual, it’s yet another lens through which to look at ourselves and our lives.
 

​I was vacationing in Colorado when the email from a friend of a friend arrived, but the question it posed was intriguing enough to distract me momentarily from the surrounding beauty of the Rocky Mountains.

“Did you happen to see on Facebook that I gave birth in the back seat of my car last month?” Alexa began.

Yes, in fact, I had seen the post, and marveled at the courage and capability with which Alexa and her husband Dave had brought their second son into the world on the side of a country road in New Hampshire in the middle of the night.

Alexa was emailing me not to brag, however, but to ask me if I could help her write up her birth story.

Could I? I thought about it. All of my memoir work thus far had been with seniors: people in their eighties and nineties recounting decades’ worth of stories, reflections, and lessons learned. Could I help Alexa write the story of what happened in the space of just a couple of hours as she gave birth to her son Camden?

But as we discussed ideas, I came to understand that Alexa had a bigger mission than just recounting the tale of her own son’s rather remarkable birth. Already interested in the potential of holistic birth experiences, she wanted to use her circumstances to spread the word and help give other women confidence in themselves and in their bodies as they approached childbirth. I could help her do this, she believed, if we could collect and compile a whole range of birth stories intended to illustrate the variety of experiences that women and their partners have as they bring babies into the world.

The compilation approach was familiar to me; although most of my projects are single- (or dual-) subject memoirs in which an individual or couple recounts the many decades of their lives, I’d done a few books at nursing homes and retirement communities where a large number of participants were invited to each tell me one story from their life, and the stories are them compiled into an anthology of sorts. That format could work well for birth stories, I thought: a series of stories of one or two thousand words, told in many different voices. Illustrated, of course, with adorable newborn photos.

“But where will we find people who want to tell us their birth stories?” I naively asked Alexa.

She only laughed. At the age of thirty, she was surrounded by women immersed in the process of birthing and raising young children. She was certain she could round up a pool of willing participants for me.

And she was right. Over the next six months, I heard stories of births of all kinds: births in hospitals, birth centers, homes, beds, bathtubs, labor tubs, and of course Alexa’s story of giving birth in a Subaru Outback. Our only requirement was that the women who participated believed that their experience had been positive and affirming, and could inspire other women.

It took us eighteen months to complete the book – exactly twice as long as the gestation of an actual baby – but as of this week, our newborn has arrived, and we love it already. We named it “Carried In My Body, Cradled In My Arms: Women Share Their Uncensored, Authentic and Empowering Birth Stories.”

It took my co-editor, my cover designer and me a long time to come up with the three adjectives in our subtitle. After much debate, we settled on “uncensored, authentic and empowering.” True, that’s what these birth stories are meant to be. But the more I think about it, that seems to me that those adjectives apply to my senior memoirs as well. I want readers – whether they are reading about their great-grandparents’ long lives or a stranger’s single day of labor and delivery – to believe that they are getting an informative and inspiring account that might help them to approach their own life better.

Uncensored, authentic and empowering stories of real lives, no matter what the topic or the stage of life: this is what memoir writing is all about.

Click here to see the book!