The Clock Is Still Ticking: Teaching Our Children the Healing Power of Story
Today is Memorial Day, and I’ve been thinking about what it means to preserve memory—not just in national ritual, but in the quiet, everyday stories we carry and pass on.
One of the first real steps I took toward healing was telling my story—out loud, in public, and in full.
I was terrified. For years, I had tried to stay quiet. There were voices inside me that said it was too raw, too soon, too much. There were voices around me, too. People who cared about me, but said I might be too sick to speak. Too unstable. Too broken to be trusted with other people’s hearts. I didn’t know yet if they were wrong. I just knew that staying silent had started to hurt.
So I spoke. Sometimes steady, sometimes shaking, I stood in front of high school students, college classrooms, survivors, future social workers, policymakers, and friends. I told the truth—about mental illness, secrecy, relapse, shame, and the winding, uneven road toward healing. I didn’t speak from a mountaintop. I spoke from the middle.
Back then, I didn’t realize what I was doing. I just knew I needed a way to live with what I had lived through. Now I see that giving shape to chaos is sacred work. That was what story did. It held the pain but also made space for meaning. It stretched far enough to hold who I was and who I was still becoming.
This is one of the greatest gifts we can give our children.
Not stories we write for them. Not neat versions where everything resolves. Real stories. Stories they craft over time—with their words, their drawings, their questions, their silences. Stories that help them feel whole inside their lives.
Children start doing this earlier than we think. When they tell us about a moment on the playground that felt unfair, they’re shaping it into something they can hold. When they draw a sad face in the corner of a family picture or whisper that a friend left them out, they’re already beginning to tell their truth. When they ask, “Did you ever feel like this too?” they’re not just asking about us. They’re trying to see where they fit in a world that came before them.
Sometimes the storytelling begins in silence. A child might linger over a toy before letting it go, or run a finger along the edge of a photograph. These quiet moments often come before the words. They carry feeling before language arrives.
A few weeks after we cleaned out my daughter’s room, after we had sorted and donated old toys together, she came looking for a set of small dolls. “Where are they?” she asked, rummaging through a bin. I reminded her we had given them away. She paused. “I wasn’t ready to let them go.”
It wasn’t about the dolls, not really. It was the sudden space where something used to be. A part of her that she wasn’t ready to say goodbye to. That small moment—that whispered truth—was a story. A story about change, about loss, about the quiet ache of growing up. She didn’t cry. She didn’t rage. She just needed to say it. To name what was no longer there. To claim her place inside it.
These are the moments when story becomes a way through.
It helps kids understand that the past isn’t just what happened. It’s also what they make of it. And they have the power to shape what they carry.
We don’t need to push them toward insight. We just need to make space for it.
We can say:
Tell me what you remember.
What part felt hardest?
What helped you through it?
What do you want me to know?
These questions invite something real. They say: your voice matters. What you lived matters. The way you hold it? That matters too.
Over time, kids begin to see that their lives more than just a series of events. They’re stories in motion. Stories they get to shape, reshape, carry, and release.
And they’re not doing this alone. They are part of something larger.
When children tell their stories, they enter into a lineage of meaning-making. They join the memory-work that happens in kitchens and car rides and quiet evenings. They connect to the stories we carry, and the ones our parents carried before us.
Not long ago, I came across a poem I had written years earlier—a piece I had nearly forgotten. It surfaced while I was looking for something else, tucked between notebooks and old papers. As I read it again, I could feel how much of it still lived in me. The voice of my grandmother, the sound of my son’s breath, the memory of a kitchen I hadn’t stepped into in decades. Time folded in on itself. My child’s face appeared in the body of someone long gone. A sorrow from the past surfaced in a comfort from the present.
That’s how memory works. It doesn’t unfold in straight lines.
Healing doesn’t either.
We circle back.
We touch old wounds with new hands.
We speak—not to fix the past, but to understand how it lives inside us.
This is what we can offer our children. Not protection from pain, but a path through it. A way to live with what’s been—and to keep going.
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What This Teaches Us
Storytelling is more than remembering. It is how we heal.
When we encourage our children to tell their stories—messy ones, magical ones, unfinished ones—we offer them something lasting:
• A way to process their experiences and shape meaning from them
• A sense of agency over their inner world, especially in moments of change or uncertainty
• A connection to something larger: to family, to memory, to time itself
• A reminder that pain is not the end of the story
• An invitation to speak, to be heard, and to keep growing
We don’t have to solve their stories.
We just have to hold them with care.
“We listen not to fix, but to witness.”
We hold the story so they can grow stronger inside it.
Here are some gentle ways to guide that process:
• “Tell me what you remember most about that day.”
• “What part felt confusing? What part felt really big inside?”
• “Do you think this story is still happening, or is it finished for now?”
• “What do you want me to understand about what it was like for you?”
• “If we were writing this as a book, what would the next page say?”
• “Do you want to draw it? Act it out? Tell it backwards? Whisper it?”
There’s no single right way to tell a story.
What matters is that our children know they’re safe to speak, and that their voice carries weight.
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A clock is ticking
in the room
where I fall asleep with my son,
the same sound from my grandpa’s
orange house bike,
in a time before Peloton.
The A/C drips onto the courtyard below,
clothing wafts gently, hung up on the line,
and my grandma’s soft humming
finds its way to my game with lost dolls.
“He was my daddy,” she says
of the man on the bike.
A picture both real and imagined
in grey and white.
In the basket, a baby
with my little one’s face—
how can that be?
I am myself still a child.
On the brown sofa sits a woman,
curly-haired and carefree,
before the dye and the chemicals,
before a baby born yellow.
That baby is in med school.
The woman has gone.
The clock is still ticking
in the room where she slept.
The smell of potato,
boring to most,
is a jolt back to the days
before lines on our faces,
the days where we lingered
and laughed.
These are the good ol’ days
for the children we raise,
the days before we know
of illness,
of dying,
of what happens beyond.
The clocks are still ticking
in the rooms that we’ve left—
homes where we played,
where we knew love,
or hurt.
Somewhere a child lays
in what was once a home
and now is in darkness,
and that clock is still ticking
in blueprints gathering dust.