We All Just Want To Be Seen

photo Carrie Stuckmann

 

 

We tell our stories to find out who we are.

 

We tell our stories to remember who we've been.

 

We tell our stories to say we are here.

 

 

This past Saturday, LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER Milwaukee gathered for the first time to meet as the 2017 cast of this year's show. 11 of us heard our stories for the first time, and we took in how our stories work together.

 

Our stories work together: as we sat around the meeting room table, an incredible serendipity began to rise. Every one of the 11 people in the room was a stranger. How is it that these 11 lives of people who do not know each other, so different and apart, make sense enough to fit in with the 10 stories shared before and the ones that came after?

 

It's because we are together in this life.

As hard as it is to believe right now, with the heartbreaking divide in this country that doesn't look like it can heal, what LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER Milwaukee created yesterday, was evidence.

 

 

Proof and evidence, that was seen, felt, and heard, on the way we have the capacity to hold each other in our lives. We join our experiences and even though we don't know each other, we feel that we do because of our stories.

 

We share our stories and we see the cracked couch where you nursed your baby who is now leaving for college. We see you as you were when you were four years old and you hear that your mother has fallen. Tell us how you as a mother of five, work to find 28 hours in a day that has only 24, and we are breathless right along with you.

 

We are there, alongside you, and we are alive. What we crave when we share our stories, is to be seen. To not disappear without someone knowing that we were here, and this sense of presence is what we need when we sit down and write our stories.

 

We want to be seen, and we are seen when we speak, and we are seen when we are in the audience and hear someone at the podium speak a story where we finally feel understood. Our lives don't feel so separate and alone anymore. Stories connect us and have us looking to each other: when we listen and when we know you when you know us.

 

Please come to our LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER Show on Sunday, May 7, at Alverno College's Wehr Theatre.

 

Come take in the stories that are a hand held out to you and you, taking that hand and saying that we see each other.

 

No one is invisible when they are seen through someone else's story and when they are heard with the words they share.

 

I have a long list why I need you to be there on May 7, but let's say this:

I don't want to forget that the love we have for each other as human beings is something that will appear, when we do.

 

xo