“The Glass Castle” Jeannette Walls

Several years ago I was the chair of the board for the local Habitat for Humanity chapter, and I wanted to share some of my story with the board to tell them they types of people our work with Habitat can help. I passed around some pictures of a house that was in ill repair. I talked about how the people in the house could not use the closets because that was where the most water came in from the roof, how the light in the kitchen was turned on by pushing live wires together, and how wildlife like black snakes and possums were always getting in through the various holes in the floor. I told them that in winter water left in the bedrooms would freeze overnight and how the oldest daughter fell through the bathroom floor on the day she left for college. I then told them that this was the house I grew up in and that my parents currently lived in and that is why I work for Habitat, because I don’t want others to have to grow up in those conditions or worse. I was hoping this story would be an inspiration for the board, but I got little response from them, and one actually said, “Yeah, yeah, we all have sad stories like that.” Do they? I don’t want to discount the possibility that they do have stories like this, but why the reluctance to listen to, or believe, my story? Does it take too much of an emotional investment to listen to this type of story? Does it hit too close to home and they don’t want to remember their own childhood? Do they think that hearing another story similar to theirs diminishes the value they place in their own life?

Jeannette Walls starts out in “The Glass Castle” saying that she used to lie about her mother and father to other people, because she didn’t want everyone to know that her parents were two of the homeless people they saw everyday on the streets. She didn’t want people to change their minds about her when they found out the truth about her parents. When I was at Arkansas Tech I used to tell stories about my family, usually the off-the-wall stories and not so much the hard times stories, but no one really believed them. I took a friend home with me to Stuttgart once, and on the way back to school she said, “You know all those stories you tell about your family? They’re true!” I don’t know whether people don’t believe the stories because they are so far removed from their own experiences that they think they must be made up or exaggerated. Maybe they really did have it as bad as I did, and they are trying to put that experience away in a box somewhere and when I tell my story it is too close to home for them. I still tell the stories, and I don’t worry about other people changing their minds about me, because they either don’t believe the stories or they don’t really listen to them. It is not so much that my life mirrors Walls’ life, we both have some hard stories to tell but they are different stories, but the fact that she has told her story and the world listened makes me feel better about my story, whether anyone is listening or not.

I share Walls’ frustration about not being able to help her parents after her own life is established. Money is not always the answer, and how one person chooses to spend his or her life is not what another person needs. Just as in my family, I found the things her mother and father did and said as she was growing up contradictory and confusing. The logic her parents used teetered between good sense and craziness. Her mother said that she spent her entire life taking care of other people, and yet she never really took care of the kids. Walls’ mother once said, “I’m a grown woman. Why can’t I do what I want?” but she also said, “He is my husband. I have no choice” when they had to leave a town because her father thought it was time to move on. I personally couldn’t live with that logic, but if I am to understand my own mother, I have to accept that others do not think the way I do.

I hope I continue not to be afraid to listen to and validate others’ stories about their lives. We all have one to tell not matter where and how we grew up.