My Poor, Aching Memory

I got a lot of fun cards for my birthday this year, but the one from my mom made me cry. It wasn’t the factory-produced sappy sentiment that did it; it was the handwritten addition from my mom. Where the card showed a picture of a table set for a tea party, she wrote: “Taco Tico – Arkansas City, KS. You were 4. You looked like Brooka. Bought groceries and a taco lunch afterward. Just me and you. Outside if it was nice!”

I don’t remember Taco Tico or even liking tacos when I was a kid. I’ve never heard of Arkansas City, Kansas. (I imagine it was the “big city” where people from South Haven, where we lived at the time, went to shop at Alco.) I remember little about my early childhood, and what I do remember is not particularly pleasant (falling down the stairs, dogs getting hit by cars or bitten by snakes, my granddad dying, mean little girls, and dragging my stuffed animals out of the trash, when my dad wasn’t looking, every time we moved). Why is it that my young brain latched onto the negative memories but seemed to resist storing the good?

I hope this is unique to me. As a result of my mom’s card, I plan to ask her to write down more experiences like Taco Tico. Maybe that will help me remember. Or at least make me think I remember.

This has gotten me a bit discouraged about the fabulous childhood my own children are forgetting right before my eyes. I ran across Braden’s preschool class picture a few days ago, and when I showed it to him, he didn’t remember one kid. I had to point out Shaefer, Braden’s best buddy at the time. Granted, we haven’t seen these kids in five years, but he spent an entire year with them when he was four! And now it’s as if it never happened. Just like me and Taco Tico.

It makes me rethink the effort I put into birthday parties. Kind of depressing to think of the lengths I went to for Addison’s firestation birthday party three years ago that she now barely remembers. Yeah, she’ll have a few pages in her album and a huge banner that I splurged on from the Party Express catalog, but she’ll forget how passionately she wanted to be a “firegirl” and how thrilled she was to sit on that firetruck for the first time. And is it possible that Brooka’s all-encompassing love of tigers will be packed away some day just like Braden’s obsession with Blue’s Clues?

Of course I’m grateful for early memory loss when I let my babies “cry it out” in their cribs or when a little one waltzes into our bedroom at an inopportune time. But why can’t they automatically remember all the stuff I want them to?

Maybe it’s more about me remembering all the fun we’re having now so we can have wonderful times talking about it someday. So we can fall back on shared experiences during those awkward lulls in Thanksgiving conversation thirty years from now.

Time marches on. I can only hope my memory goes with it.