Questions to ask your mum, the family’s memory keeper.

For her doctoral research at McMaster University, completed in 1981, the Canadian sociologist Carolyn Rosenthal interviewed 464 men and women over the age of forty in Hamilton, Ontario, about how their families worked. She was not asking about love or money. She was asking who did the unglamorous work of keeping a family connected: who phoned, who wrote, who organised the gathering, who knew which cousin had fallen out with whom and why. Families, she found, tended to have one such person, and in her data that person was overwhelmingly a woman. She gave the role a name, and in a 1985 paper in the Journal of Marriage and Family she called it kinkeeping.

If you are looking for questions to ask your mom, or your mum, that fact is a good place to start, because it explains both why her stories matter and why they are so rarely collected. She is probably the person in your family who knows the most. She is also, almost by definition, the person who spends her time keeping other people’s stories alive. Hers is the one nobody gets around to.

Why is your mum’s story the one that goes missing?

Three mechanisms work together, and none of them requires anyone to behave badly.

The first is attention. A person who is always the one remembering and organising becomes the audience for everyone else’s news. At the dinner table, the conversation runs towards the children, the grandchildren and the aunt with the new hip. Questions about her own life feel oddly formal in a house where she has always been the one asking.

The second is identity. Mothers are known to their children as mothers, in a role that has no obvious beginning. Most of us find it hard to imagine our mum at nineteen, unsure what to do with her life, because the only person we have ever met is the one who was already in charge of ours.

The third is paper. In most English-speaking countries, a woman has traditionally taken her husband’s surname on marriage, so a family tree built by surname follows the men and loses the women within a generation. The record of what your mother’s mother did, and what her mother did, is far thinner than the record for the male line, and often survives only in the memory of a living woman. (This is part of why most of us cannot name our great-great-grandparents.) If your mum is gone, or goes, much of it goes with her.

Does your mother know more of the family’s stories than your father?

Often, yes, and the research suggests why. Robyn Fivush and her colleagues at Emory University have spent decades studying how parents talk with children about the past. They distinguish an elaborative style, in which a parent supplies detail and invites the child into the conversation, from a repetitive one, which sticks to a few facts and rarely asks the child anything. The elaborative style is linked to richer autobiographical memory and a better grasp of emotion in the children who grow up with it. Studies also report that parents tend to be more elaborative with daughters than with sons, and the evidence for mothers in particular is less consistent than the headline suggests.

What it implies is modest but useful. In many families, the stories are handed down mostly through conversations between mothers and daughters, and the sons, and the men, hear the short version. If you are the son, you may know less than you assume. (Fathers present a different problem, which I take up in questions to ask your dad.) If you are the daughter, you may know more, but only the stories you were told, which were chosen for you at the age you were then.

What questions should you ask your mom?

The principle from questions to ask your parents about their life applies here with extra force: the smaller the question, the bigger the story. With your mum there is a further rule. Ask about the person before the role, and ask about the role as an experience, not as a duty. The questions below are grouped in the order I would ask them.

Before she was Mum

• What was she like at sixteen? What did she believe she would do with her life?
• What did she wear, listen to and argue with her own parents about?
• Who was she closest to, and where are they now?
• What was the first thing she bought with money she had earned?
• What did she want that she never told anyone?

“Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child” by Mary Cassatt, 1880. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Public domain.

Becoming a mother

• What did she think motherhood would be, and what was it actually like?
• What was the day you were born like, from her side?
• What frightened her most in those first years?
• Who helped her, and who did she wish had?
• What is a moment of parenting she is proud of, and one she would do differently?

Her own mother

This is the section most likely to be lost, because it reaches back a generation your mum can still reach and you cannot.

• What was her mother like when she was a girl? What did she cook, say, sing or refuse to talk about?
• What did her mother teach her, deliberately or not?
• What did she promise herself she would never do as a mother?
• What does she know about her grandmother? Where did that family come from?
• What object, recipe or saying came to her from the women in her family?

What she gave up, and what she chose

• Was there a job, a place or a person she gave up on, and does she regret it?
• When did she feel most like herself?
• What has she found harder than she expected? What easier?
• What would she say to a young woman starting out now?

The ordinary things

These are the questions most families skip, and the answers are often what they miss most afterwards.

• How did she make the thing she always made? Could she show you, with the camera running?
• What did the house smell like on a Sunday?
• What did she sing to you?
• What did she say when she was worried, or proud?

And end, as I do with every interview, by asking whether there is anything she would like to talk about that nobody has asked.

How do you get your mum to talk about herself?

Expect a deflection first. A woman who has spent her life attending to others will often answer with a story about someone else: your father, your sister, her own mother. This is not evasion. It is the habit of a kinkeeper, and it is worth following, because her account of how she saw everyone else is also an account of her. Then ask the same question again in the first person: And where were you in all that?

Three things help. Say plainly why you are asking: that you want to know her, not only the family, and that the recording is for people who are not born yet. Ask for scenes in preference to summaries, since “describe your wedding day” will beat “how was your marriage” every time. And choose the setting carefully. A mother is rarely off duty in her own kitchen. Sit somewhere she is not hosting, with no one to feed. The practical details, including hearing, pace and fatigue, are covered in how to interview older family members.

“Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1”, usually called Whistler’s Mother, by James McNeill Whistler, 1871. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Public domain.

Why film it instead of writing it down?

Because the answer to “What was she like at sixteen?” is partly in the way she laughs while she answers. I have four hours of my grandmother telling the story of her life, and she has since passed away. What I go back to is rarely the content. It is the voice, the pauses, the expression that arrived a second before the punchline. A transcript keeps the information and discards most of what made it hers.

There is also the question of who the recording is for. A woman’s story, told once to one child, passes through that child’s memory and shrinks. Filmed, it can reach the grandchildren who never met her, in her own words and face.

What should you do this week?

Pick five questions from the list above and choose the one you are most afraid to ask. Prop up a phone, press record and begin with something easy. Mothers tend to be more willing than we expect, because being asked about herself, for once, is a kind of attention she has rarely had. If you would like help with the structure, Everyone provides question packs and presents one question at a time, so you can keep your attention on her.

The research on the regrets of the dying is consistent about what people wish they had done differently, and it is rarely something they did. It is something they meant to do. The stories your mum holds are, in many families, the largest single store of memory they have. They are also the one most likely to be lost without anyone noticing, until the person who kept everyone else’s is no longer there to ask.