Memory Supplements
< div>An excuse to put up a bunch of photos.
compensate me for the hormonal loss of hair, the weight still to be lost, and
the fact that I have broken seven of my fingernails in the last week and a half,
but I’m not sure about the losing of my mind. I have to be very rigid about
hanging my keys up in the same place because I find myself searching for them
for 20 minutes when I am trying to leave the house, only to find them under a
pile of cloth diapers because somebody needed an emergency change on the way out
the door. I tucked some cash into my overalls chest pocket before walking into
a restaurant, but then strapped Søren in the Baby Bjorn to my chest, got
to the counter to pay and had to run back out to the van looking for my money,
dropping a handful of coins in the parking lot in the process… My short term
memory loss makes me worry about my long term memories. I am not the world’s
best record keeper; only Aodán had a baby book, and it has only a few
pages filled in, but I have to trust my memory to hold the most treasured
moments, and write the things I want to share hoping that I will find them one
day when I need to be reminded of what was wonderful about this
time.
Memory is a funny thing. I was
always amazed that I could hike with my dad and he could recount landmarks
sequentially, where as my brain seemed to keep a file of interesting rocks and
their associations, trees I like to look at and poems about trees, turns in the
trail and turns in metaphors for life I found hiking. I would be hard pressed
to say whether this rock came before or after that unusual tree. I have a
pretty good file of how Søren’s babbling resembles or diverges from his
brothers’, but couldn’t really tell you how old each boy was when he said his
first word. And I know enough about information to know that it is only as
useful as your ability to retrieve what you need when you need it, but I have to
trust serendipity, an evocative smell, a trick of light, a dream to bring back
childhood joys.
Maybe every parent who
has ever owned a camera has felt the need to choose between recording life and
living it. Using the question of what might cause more regret one day, I try to
balance the two. I will play with the kids and write about it to keep what I
treasure most.
Some of the best stories
of the last few weeks are Xander’s. There’s something going on developmentally
with four-year-old’s as the make these unique connections — I’ll think Xander’s
not paying attention when we’re read before bed because he interrupts me
mid-sentence to ask if he can give me a zerbert, but when we read about
Bellerophon fighting the chimera he compared it to Hercules and the Hydra. He
believes in the magical cure-all power of band-aids. His grandmother reports
that he was running around with a baseball and bat she had bought for the boys
and told her it was an exclamation point. And when I was annoyed at him for
marking his face with marker he made me laugh by telling me he was just getting
ready for the Boston Tea Party.
Another
thing I really want to remember is Søren’s first bath with his big
brothers… the joy of his being able to sit up by himself!
and I went a little picture crazy after the
bath, especially as he tried to eat his
towel…
