I think a cool addition to bridal showers and baby showers is storytelling. I know it happens without planning it... but does it? Or do we spend the entire four hours catching up and never get to the event? I'd love to attend a bridal shower where we the gift-giving is optional but the telling of a story is expected. That's the thing you bring. You wrap it up in a little forethought, and you limit it to three minutes or so. A bridal story shower, or a bridal telling (and a baby telling!). I want stories of real life more than I want the stuff. (Thank you for the stuff, I needed the stuff, too, though.)
Stories are the gift that grows the courage to step forward into the next part of life.
There isn't room in our houses for all the photos and letters and journals of our forebears. But we can tell the stories.
For a bridal telling, I would want my one friend to relate the story of their first night together, in all its honesty and heartbreak of disappointment. I would want my other friend to tell us about how she burnt dinner very often during her first two years of marriage, and served those meals wearing only an apron. It was a fun thing, not sad. You have to hear her tell it.
I would tell about our honeymoon in all its hilarity and spice, things that don't belong on a blog future employers may find.
For a baby telling, I would want my mother-in-law to talk about breastfeeding, how every time her first child latched, a white hot pain shot through her; every time, and she didn't give up. And Shelby to tell of her two c-sections, one traumatic, one peaceful.
I would tell about my fears, and almost suffocating Tessa by accident when we co-slept and she was swaddled. I shudder to think about it as I write. I would tell about how after nursing and nursing AND nursing on and off for hours, right around 9:30 PM one night, she fell asleep so deeply that I could lay her in her bassinet, and there she slept for hours. It happened all at once, just as I was about to despair, she surprised me by being a growing human being. I tell you, in the first month, I was exultant and miserable all at once, and didn't know if I was loving her. I was just trying to keep up and to take care of us both without hurting anyone's feelings in the meantime.
There is something pretty important about being surrounded by other women when you cross these thresholds. So we buy stuff. We go to Target and get gifts and wrap them, then bring them to the party to be unwrapped and suddenly all that paper is a burden and we throw it away, and pile up the goods in bags, after all... These are important items for life, yes. But our stories are our treasures.
