The lonely rainbow: the power of storytelling

When my daughter was younger we would read a few of her favorite books and sing a few songs until she drifted off to sleep. As she got older, the need for complete darkness in the room increased so, we began to tell her the popular bedtime stories that one always tells. Then one day she asked if I could tell her a story of a blue horse. I knew of no such story so, I made it up.

She loved it.

After that evening, she asked for a new story each night. Stories of a black bird, a red elephant, a green duck and with each request I created a new story, some of which I felt proud of and some I would stumble through to finish. If I did a decent job by her standards, she would ask me to tell the same story the next night which proved difficult at times because I couldn’t always remember the story very well. Often, she would remember it better than I did and say things like, “No mommy, remember the bird’s feet got cold.”

The stories slowly began to help me prepare her for big changes such as long trips, the start of school, or family changes. I would use our bedtime stories to tell her of an animal or child who experienced what she would soon be experiencing and how they handled the situation. (Children learn so much from storytelling and can greatly benefit from being able to tell and make sense of the stories in their life.)

During a busier season in our lives, I would be in charge of putting our children to bed and when my partner arrived he would often take over our daughter’s bedtime routine. Some nights we would brief each other on the stories we told in case she asked for the same story the following night. And then it happened. We were both home one evening, and my daughter requested that her dad put her to sleep because, “I like daddy’s stories better”. And so began the internal competition I would have with myself to tell better stories than my partner. I could always tell if it was a good story if I managed to make my daughter giggle, not because it was funny, but because she found something endearing in it.

One evening my daughter asked me to tell her a story of a lonely rainbow.

I began the story in a meadow where it has been raining for some time. The rain stops, the sun shines, and shortly after a rainbow appears. The rainbow looks around and sees kids playing together, squirrels running up a tree, and dogs jumping trying to catch the squirrels. The rainbow notices that everything it sees has a friend. The squirrel has another squirrel to play with and the tree has another tree to sway and dance with but, the rainbow has no one.

A few days later, it rains again, the sun comes out, and the rainbow appears. She looks around again and cries to the sun saying how lonely she is.

As an adult, I hope you’ve caught on to the direction of my story, the sun and the rain are always present with the rainbow despite her awareness.

As I continue the story, my daughter stopped me and said, “But mommy, the rainbow isn’t lonely.” Here is where I thought she’d caught on and would tell me about the sun and the rain that were with the rainbow but instead she said, “The rainbow had the dogs, and trees, and squirrels with her all the time!”

I can’t remember how I ended the story, nor is it too important, but when I reflect on this bedtime story I think about the different perspective my child has on the world. Sometimes I forget and unconsciously expect her to see the world from an adult’s perspective. Sometimes I forget that while she is completely human and very verbal the world is still new, and she is learning to live in a world of grownups. And yet, our children often see much more than we do, they notices the expressions on faces and the feelings behind those expressions better than most adults and they notices the beauty of the things around them much more than we do. It’s in moments like these that, thanks to my child, I remember to pause and notice all the beauty around me even when I’m in my darkest, loneliest state.