Still Becoming...

A birthday gift, 52 stories, and the experience of seeing a life take shape.

Welcome to Age with Attitude, where I explore one question:

What sustains a life as we age?

My subscription to Storyworth arrived as a 69th birthday gift from my London-based daughter. What began as a gift of memory has become evidence of a life still unfolding.

My only daughter has such a gift for making memories, spending the past two decades thoughtfully creating traditions for her family.

At the start of every Summer, she would create a ‘Summer List’. A colourfully decorated poster went up on the wall to document activities she planned for her daughter over the Summer holidays, and they would ceremoniously tick it off as they went along.

In addition, before her now 19-year-old daughter started school, she purchased a copy of Dr Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! At the end of every school year, she asked that year’s teacher to write something in the book. This ritual was carried out in secret for 12 years. At her graduation lunch, she presented it to her daughter to mark the beginning of her life’s journey.

Storyworth became another expression of that same instinct for making family memories, this time for me.

Each Monday for a year, Storyworth sent me a question curated by my daughter from the many available options. I had a weekly writing prompt to ponder, to gather long-lost information about, to write about, and to find old photos. 52 stories in total, crafted to form the story of my life so far.

I tried to keep up.

I relied on elderly family members and a couple of family genealogists to help gather information. My sisters remembered trips we took that had clearly been scrubbed from my memory. They even had photos.

I had already collected stories from my mother’s regular ‘Cousins Day’. Each month, the women in her family would gather to tell stories, laugh, and reminisce. I loved being part of what I called ‘Secret Women’s Business’, learning about my maternal ancestry from those gatherings.

The writing was difficult, even raw at times. I had to address parts of my life that didn’t go as planned, as well as the great times and treasured memories.

Some questions were trivial, like: How did you learn to ride a bike?

Some were profound, like: How did you get your name? Mine came from my great-aunt, my father’s sister, who died months before dad was born.

Some were forward-thinking, like writing to my unborn first great-great-grandchild, whom I may never meet.

My daughter peeked at the stories as I wrote and loves her final printed version.

Another copy awaits my son on his next visit. I want to deliver it personally before I hand a copy to his daughter, my other granddaughter, who eagerly awaits the read.

I explained to her that this book is the story of me up to 70.

The rest is still being written.

Not in a hardcover book this time, but in the ordinary days I keep paying attention to. In the walks, the conversations, the questions, the experiments, the moments that make me stop and think: there is something here.

Perhaps this is why the project stayed with me. It sat quietly beside the question I keep returning to now:

What sustains a life?

Storyworth did not simply ask me to remember.

It asked me to notice the shaping of a life.

To look back and see what had formed me.

To gather the fragments.

To make sense of what I could.

To leave a record for the people who come after me.

And then, quietly, it handed the pen back.

Because 70 is not the end of the story.

It is simply the point at which I became more deliberate about writing the next chapter while I am still very much living it.

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My Favorite Reads this week:

The Fear That Doesn’t Have a Name by Jane Barratt

Mitochondria Are Maternal: A Practice of Mothers by Christina Palmer, MD

Goodbye Substack, hello Tuhat by Sascha