In our family, the adults exaggerate more than the kids!

We’re sharing leech stories round the table. My daughter-in-law Claudia starts it. “I heard of someone who got a leech up his nose. He pulled it out, but it wouldn’t stop bleeding. They had to take him to Emergency.”

“There was a bloke camping with us in the bush who woke up because he couldn’t breathe,” says Lizzie, my daughter. “He had leeches up both nostrils, and they were so fat with his blood they were blocking his nose.”

My favourite (the most horrible) is from my husband, Dan. “I saw a child with a leech on her eyeball!”

The grandchildren shudder as they listen. “Eeeew!” they say. “That’s so gross!”

In Australia we love to tell stories about our encounters with wild life. Leeches are good, but snakes are the most popular: everyone has a snake story, and once we start it’s hard to stop. Shark stories, jellyfish stories, spiders, ticks and leeches: they’re part of our lives. Our cultural inheritance, if you like! We especially love telling them to foreigners, making everything just that much bigger and scarier.
Now that I’m in my sixties I get more mileage out of my stories, because I forget I’ve already told them. The other evening a two-metre carpet snake crawled along the edge of our verandah, and I nearly trod on it, barefoot, before it slithered off down a tree. That made a good story, and I’ve told it several times.

When children tell stories, they don’t care so much about the effect on the listener. Their pleasure lies in the telling. My grandson Jim said the other day, as he often does, “Nanma, can I tell you something?”

“Yes, Jim – what is it?”

“That Harry Potter movie I watched was really good…”

Then he retold it to me. It was no good trying to interrupt or change the subject; he wouldn’t stop until he’d finished. I suppose that for children, being able to remember details is a necessary skill, built into their developing brains. Unlike adults, they don’t seek to exaggerate and make their stories more interesting.

Like adults, children sometimes talk a lot when they’re nervous. When my niece’s little boy broke his leg, he confided lots of interesting information to the hospital staff as he was being x-rayed and plastered.

“Our toaster caught fire!”

“Sometimes I pick my nose.”

“My granddad’s water tank fell over.”

When they’re little, they’re also too innocent to know what is appropriate. Every teacher of young children, including me, has had the experience, at show and tell time, of quickly cutting off stories about what Mummy and Daddy were doing in the lounge room last night when Daddy had no pants on. Grandparents, too, sometimes hear stories that they’d rather not, about what Mummy did when Daddy stayed out late, or what Daddy said when Mummy crunched the car, and we have to change the subject. Mummy and Daddy don’t want intimate details and domestic rows passed on to their parents or in-laws.

As grandparents, we have to be at our most discreet when talking to one family about another. Just because, Family A confides to us their financial difficulties doesn’t mean they want Family B to know about it. If we find out that Family B is having marriage problems, or if we’ve had a falling-out with them about how they manage their children, we keep our mouths closed about it when speaking to Family A. If we don’t, it will get back to the other family the next time they have an argument, and our children won’t confide in us again.

There’s enough mutual criticism among grown-up siblings without their parents joining in. We’re better off sticking to leech stories. They draw less blood.

By the way, you’ll like this story. The other evening a three-metre carpet snake crawled along our verandah, and I nearly trod on it in bare feet…

I’ve told you already? Really?

What are your family dynamics like? Does everyone communicate openly or is it segmented? Tell us in the comments below…