Re-written every line

Julia at Here Be Hippogriffs wrote about her less than stellar experience at the preschool Halloween event last week.  Her son didn't want to wear a costume, she forgot the camera, all the other mothers apparently became bosom friends while she was out grabbing coffee.  We've all been there.

One of the commentators reassured Julia with words that I've heard before: "What [your son will] remember when he grows up is how much time you spent with him, not how many pictures you took. "

I'm feeling much more bleak.  I would say: your son won't remember any of this at all.  You'll barely remember it, and your brain has a fully developed capacity for long-term memory.  Consider what you remember of your life before the age of five, or ten, or fifteen.  That's what will remain for your son.

Childhood flies past us, tracing deep grooves in our selves, but the grooves don't scroll backward in moving-picture images.  What remains is our sense of self, our gut instinct about the world, our confidence (or lack thereof) in ourselves.

That's why the camera crazies are going crazy: because they're trying to capture the ineffable.  I know, I'm one of them.  And I don't apologize for this: I could have ten times the number of childhood photos I have of myself, ten times the number of clues into my long-lost childhood self, and still not have too many.

Then again, I'm professionally inclined toward the preservation of the past.  You might even accuse me, not without merit, of fetishizing the past.

My anxiety to preserve my present days is only matched by my anxiety that my concern for preservation has blinded me to the pleasures of directly experiencing my present.  So you don't need to warn me about that.  Besides, to the extent that you enjoy reading these random musings, you'd be operating against your own interests.

So here's the philosophical question: what is our childhood?  If you're prepared to accept, as I am, that memory plays a role in shaping our selves, that childhood is valuable not just for the subconcious effects it has on our inborn temperments but also for its storehouse of tales re-told in adulthood, what difference does it make that we forget most of our childhoods?  How much does it matter for us as parents, parents trying to create "good childhoods" for our children, trying to lay down strong foundations, when what we remember of our childhood often diverges pretty radically from what our own parents remember. 

I ask because I have some of my mom's rage issues.  I have my own struggles with detachment -- with the sensation that the million petty responsibilities of my life are crushing me.  And I worry about those problems.  A lot.  And as I've talked about my childhood memories with my mom, I've discovered that most of what she remembers most vividly from my first years, I've not only forgotten, I've erased.  The plot of her parenthood varies almost 100 percent from the plot of my childhood.

Mom read books to me before bed?  We said what prayers?  We followed what rituals?

Have I forgotten most of those things because they had mostly petered out by the time I was five, or because they didn't fit the storyline I was writing for myself, to make sense of my life as I experienced it?

Mothers are forever reassuring each other: your child will remember the best parts of their life with you.  The bad days, the ellisions, the mistakes, they won't matter in the long run.

Does it work like that for you?  Becoming a mother has awakened long-dormant memories, sense-impressions even, of my earliest years.  They're mostly not happy memories.  When they are happy, they mimic children's books: parents are not integral to the plot.

Do my stories diverge so wildly from my mother's because mine was an unhappy childhood?  By what process did the rages come to outweigh the afternoons spent baking Christmas cookies or mornings in the car on our way to church?

I don't believe there's an algorhythm for this.  We can't tally up our successes and failures at the end of the day, or the week, or the year, and know how our children will see us and see themselves -- not just next year, or in their adulthood, but as they lie awake waiting to enter dreamland in the next room.  We're operating in the dark, without a guidebook.  No one really knows what makes a happy childhood.

How will the kids remember these years?  Will they remember the books, the adventures at the museums, the cross-country road trips?  What vague, blurry snapshots of childhood will come to life in their minds' eyes if any of my children become parents?  How will they feel when they look at the photos?  What will their childhood have become?

How do I measure our days?

Comments

[Tulip]

Maybe I'm a freak (okay, that's probably a definite), but I do recall my childhood in minute detail. I recall the myriad of spankings & beatings. I recall my father & his rages. I recall a zillion happy times, but I also recall being afraid as a child because I did not measure up to what I perceived as my parents expectations (especially since I was spanked when I didn't measure up). I believe that my scared, sad, and painful memories are equal to the happy ones. Actually, considering the enormous emotional impact they had on me, they're probably more dominant or important. They certainly have shaped who I want to be as a parent, and HOW I want to parent. Just like the show "What not to wear" mirrors bad fashion, my mental show of "How not to parent" shapes the way I guide my children.

I've never heard other mothers reassure themselves that their children will only remember the good times. That seems like a load of self-delusional crap to try and justify a range of issues, such as not being willing to do the hard work and correct what is wrong with themselves (the mothers).

I do agree that kids will remember that a parent was THERE for them versus the amount of pictures being taken. But then, I've shared with you before that I'm more concerned with experiencing life with my kids than taking pictures or video of it.

My mother's recollection of my childhood, as well as the childhood of my siblings, does not match up with what we remember. We all remember severe beatings. She remembers none. We all remember cowering in fear. She holds no such memory. We all remember a large number of negative, powerful experiences that have shaped who we are today. She has no recollection of such things, and is truly perplexed whenever anyone is foolish enough to bring the subject up. She has no idea what we are talking about. And that's okay.

[Meg]

I wouldn't say I had an unhappy childhood, and most of the memories I have center on the good rather than the bad. Also, I only remember little pieces of bigger things. I don't remember the entire vacation, but I do remember how much fun my sister and I had jumping from one queen bed to the other. I don't remember much about first grade, but I do remember that my mom ran home from the class Christmas party to get the gift for the teacher that I forgot at home. I also remember being very ungrateful about the fact that she went all the way home for it, and saying "I can't believe it took you so long!" I think the reason I remember that part, though, is that it was one of the stories that got retold a hundred times during my childhood.

Our memmories of our childhood are all mixed up with the stories our parents tell us of what happened, even while our childhood is still happening. I don't think that it is possible to seperate what really happened from the told and retold versions of it.

I also take pictures like crazy. I think I am trying help all of us (my kids and me) to hold onto more than just those little pieces (already thier infanthood is becoming a blur, pictures or not, so I 'm not sure it is working). I want them to have not just my stories but thier own to remember as well (my plan is to write down what they thought of the Grand Canyon or the Halloween Parade at school, but I don't always get to it). There are more pictures of my two kids before the age of four than I probably have of my whole childhood, but I think to myself "maybe I would remember pre-school better if I had a picture of my teacher or my classmates or where my cubby was". And how cool would it be to read a few sentence of what I was thinking about at the age of three. That little girl was me, all the things that happened to her ultimately helped to form the person that I am now.

It is the things that we take pictures of and therefore tell and retell in our stories that they will remember. I have no idea if my mom took us to the library every week like I take the boys...so one week I took pictures of the three of us there, making sure to get the shot of where the favorite train books are, because that is what is important to him now and the pictures and the stories as we look at the albums together over the years will help him remember it. Of course, my kids memories will still be seasoned by what stories I choose to tell them about it, but that can't be helped.

[Lisa C.]

I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately. I look at the Moosh and I try to remember my life at his age (28 months, currently). I can't. My mother tells me stories about my babyhood, things she did with me, the songs she sang to me, the time we spent together. They are some of her happiest memories. Unfortunately, to me, they are just stories she tells, because I simply do not remember.

When I feel guilty about not spending all my free time entertaining the Moosh, I try to remember if my parents played with me. I can't remember that the did, and my mother assures me that she did not spend endless hours entertaining us as children. We played with each other, while my parents worked.

I do remember playing with my siblings, fond, fast memories of hours of imaginative play, fights, whatever.

The Moosh's life is different from mine, though. At his age, I already had a younger sister, a high-needs baby if there ever was one, and my mother tells me that she and I were at war with each other over my jealousy. I don't remember that, either. The Moosh will be well over three by the time I get around to having another child, so his experience may be totally different from mine.

When the Moosh was first born, I took picture after picture of him, but now that he's capable of being played with, I spend most of my time just interacting with him instead of treating him as a photographic subject. There's also the slight problem of him wanting to take pictures whenever he sees the camera. As soon as I pull it out, he stops whatever cute thing he was doing and runs for the camera. Kind of ruins it for me a little. :(

[Phantom Scribbler]

I hear you, Jody. I have plenty of my own rage issues, and a lot invested in the idea that the divergence between my memories of childhood and my parents' memories of their parenthood is a symptom of what was wrong with my world while I was growing up. I don't want to believe (as I really ought to) that my children will feel the same when they grow up.

My dad sends me digitized photos from my childhood by the hundreds, and my smiles (or not) for the camera are as much fodder for varying interpretations as any other historical object. Look! he says. See how happy you looked? But I always think I looked sad...

By the way, how ironic (in the Alanis Morissette sense of the word) is it that "Blue Jay's Dance" was on your Library Thing list when I loaded this page? I don't have the book anymore -- the divergence between her lovely stories of motherhood, and the picture that emerged after Michael Dorris' suicide was just too much for me to take.

[Sarah]

I think pictures do shape your childhood and your memories. I say that based on the difference between the memories of my husband and I have about our respective childhoods. My husband has very few memories of much before age...10. And we have no photos before that age and almost no photos until he met me and I applied my photographics habits toward him (~10 years later). I feel like I remember most of my childhood. I also have the "normal" American photo albums documenting birthdays, trips and holidays. Do I really remember things? Or do the pictures get me there? I don't know.

I am also a compulsive photo taker. We didn't jump whole-heartedly into digital, thank god. We kept going with film, just at a slwoer pace. I had about a year of photos that were stored on a hard drive that died. I hadn't printed them. Had no backups. It hurt me physically and I held out ridiculous hope for weeks. I even thought it was worth trying the $$$ disk restoration services, but my husband thought not.

[susoz]

Jodie, you ask too many good questions that I don't have time to respond to! Two things: my son is about to turn seven and turning seven is the first birthday I remember ie I remember thinking that seven was a lucky number.
And something about memory: when my son was in preschool age 3-4, the police horse stables were next door and after preschool we'd often go into the stables to visit the horses. This was something he loved to do and if we ever saw the horses out in the streets, we'd talk about their names and about visiting them at the stables. Well, we saw two policewomen riding horses last week, for the first time in a long time, and I said "remember going to visit the stables when you were at preschool?' and he said "No". I couldn't believe it! I tried to jog his memory but he insisted that he had no memory of it at all.

[SheilaC]

No answers for you, sorry. I do wonder about what my children will remember of these years. And I love it when I rediscover a (happy) childhood memory of my preschool years, through doing the same things with my kids. Isn't it cool when you find a classic book, and recognize the pictures that fascinated you before you could read? Do you remember the feel of fingerpainting, even if you haven't done it for 30 years? (Maybe you have, lately.)

I see that an interesting writer about motherhood and parenting issues, Ann Douglas, has just started a catalog in LibraryThing, under her own name. She's somebody who thinks, reads, and writes about these kinds of questions, so you might like to check her out some time. She has a blog at anndouglas.blogspot.com

[chris]

I wish I knew. Everything I do even remotely wrong fills me with so much guilt at the end of the day, sometimes it's overwhelming. And it's not something major, but rather did I play enough with him or did I make sure he ate enough. Little things. I think the only confident mothers are the ones who aren't putting much thought into it, frankly.

By the way, saw your comment on my blog. That sounds great. We were going to do the museums that day anyway. Kevin has that day off, so there will be another pair of (very patient) hands. Call me or email--looking forward to it.

[ALG]

I have many memories from the age of three onward. I remember my brother's birth when I was three, most of my birthdays from three on, and the first day of preschool, when I was afraid/embarrassed to tell the teacher that I had to use the bathroom. I remember my father reading books to me, and pre-bedtime songs that were sung. I remember both the good and the bad (there was plenty of both), but the most emotionally vibrant memories are definitely the ones where I was frightened for some reason. (Like when I got home from school when I was 6 and my mother wasn't home yet--she arrived home a few minutes later, but during the eternal wait, I was sure that she had forgotten about me and that I would be kidnapped before she arrived. I don't think the experience left permanent scars, though.) I love it when family members tell me of things that I said when I was really little, and love that I have my own written documentation of my childhood from around age 7 through journals and short stories that I wrote. I think that childhood is really important for forming who we are--and as grist for the mill in therapy! (Pretty much everyone I know is in therapy these days, and I'm sure most of them talk about their childhoods.)

[Erika]

Hi Jody- 1st off, thanks for your e-mail. Always nice to hear from you, I am just so very tired these days, it is so hard to think and respond coherently from this whirlwind of toddler days and sleepless baby nights.

You really ask the important, difficult questions don't you? The kind of things I'd like to talk to other moms about, but that require a bit more intimacy than I have energy for these days. Once you've come out on the other side of this, when your kids are oh, 18 or 25 or so, I really do expect a book out of you.

About childhood- I just ended a 3 year estrangement with my own mom last week with a cautious, difficult phonecall. The distance between us was needed for awhile because of her own undealt with rage issues. It's profoundly sad that it took such a drastic step for her to seek therapy, growth and change. I'm proud of her for doing it though, it's never too late. And I'm sorry I felt the need to protect my kids from her fury, she missed out on their infancy and that is a tragic loss.

See, I remember so much of my childhood. The lovely picnics, being read to, elaborate sand castles at the beach, all the good stories she likes to remind me of. But pervading it all was the unpredictability of my mother's rages, her anxiety and her blame of us for both those issues. Oh, and there were no beatings, things really weren't that bad from the outside, but this only enhances my fear as a parent that the memories and relationships we form with our children today are based on such tenuous, fragile things. They probably will remember the bad stuff, honestly- I did. Will the good outweigh it? Will our kids hopefully see us struggle with the rage thing and learn healthier tools for dealing with their own lives and emotions as an adult because we are working to change it now, instead of when they are 30? I don't know, and some of it comes down more to the resilience of the individual child rather than the actual behavior of the adult. My eldest is so fragile, my middle child is tougher (thank goodness, because her resemblance to my own mother in appearance and temperment could be a disaster otherwise.) I think you are doing the best you can, which is all that's expected of us in this life. Our capacity for parenting will grow if we keep working at it. And you know, if the kids complain about their childhood once they are adults, just pull out all the happy photos you've taken and tell them the good stories, over and over, until those are the memories that seep into their psyche and get told to their own children someday. My best wishes to you, from someone else who is still trying to figure these same things out-

[Scrivener]

Great post, which has got me thinking. I will circle back later for an actual response, but for now I wanted to just say that I appreciate this post.

[Elizabeth]

Interesting post and discussion. I have one memory from age 3 (which my parents say didn't happen the way I remember), one from age 5, and that's pretty much it until kindergarten. It's hard to imagine that the boys won't remember any of this time, but it's likely...

[Susan]

Great post, Jody. I've been thinking about it a lot today, and still haven't quite formulated what I want to say.

But one of the things I'm thinking, hoping, is that what children internalize--whether they remember it or not--are habits of mind and heart (some of which they come with and some of which we help shape).

One big plank in our parenting platform is to make sure that our child is in therapy for her very own issues, not for ours. So at the very least, I take comfort in that.

[susoz]

Just wanted to add that when I said the first birthday I remember is seven, that doesn't mean I don't have memories from before seven. I do, lots of them. But turning seven is the first time I had a self-consciousness - a memory of my own *thoughts* as opposed to a visual memory.

[Ally]

I have very few memories as a young child, although i do remember my mom being arrested for shoplifting, and one of the degenerates we lived with threatening me for some reason. Thankfully my grandparents saved me from that life when I was about 4 years old, but for years I felt almost...not real because there were no photos of me as a baby or toddler. My cousins had pictures, my (half) brother and sisters had pictures, but I didn't. For years and years (for this and many other reasons) I felt like I didn't belong.

What I want for Jamie to take away from his childhood is a sense of safety and belonging, and the certainty of being loved. I'm less concerned about the specifics at this point although I guess we're laying the foundation for future memories now.

As you might imagine, I relish taking photos of Jamie, and I love the freedom digital photography gives me. I can snap and snap and snap to my heart's content.