Unreliable memories
The other day I proclaimed that I was the same person now as I was when I was a child. Meaning really that I feel a stronger connection and continuity with my childhood self than most adults. Childhood is more emotionally alive for me, and life continues to be this way.
But memories, powerful though they may be, are notoriously unreliable. I feel like I've always been narrating and curating my own life. So which details have I decided to archive or alter or ignore to suit the story I'm telling the world? I remember the childhood frustration and suffocation, being powerless. I remember the intensity and the starkness, every event feeling mythic or wanting to be. Things grown-ups said. Things kids said. Things I thought about them and didn't say. But what is true? I have a feeling other people's encounters with me as a child probably left a different impression, and so what does that mean for memory and truth?
I think that my childhood experiences and their continued life in my memory influences how I act as an adult and a parent. How willing am I to consider that my memories may be wrong? What else informs my version of myself? Maybe my insistence on the clarity of my childhood memories is actually part of working through some juvenile injustices-not being listened to, being silenced.
Louie is now the same age as my early memories. I wonder if he will feel the same nervousness in his stomach that I felt when I walked into my new kindergarten class, or the same warm happiness when his teacher smiles at him, or the relief when someone befriends him. I have to be careful to let him have his own experiences. I know we are not perfect parents, and some measure of childhood angst is inevitable, but I hope he and Darren will always share with me their mythic experience of the world.
Walking around Manhattan is pretty epic.
But memories, powerful though they may be, are notoriously unreliable. I feel like I've always been narrating and curating my own life. So which details have I decided to archive or alter or ignore to suit the story I'm telling the world? I remember the childhood frustration and suffocation, being powerless. I remember the intensity and the starkness, every event feeling mythic or wanting to be. Things grown-ups said. Things kids said. Things I thought about them and didn't say. But what is true? I have a feeling other people's encounters with me as a child probably left a different impression, and so what does that mean for memory and truth?
I think that my childhood experiences and their continued life in my memory influences how I act as an adult and a parent. How willing am I to consider that my memories may be wrong? What else informs my version of myself? Maybe my insistence on the clarity of my childhood memories is actually part of working through some juvenile injustices-not being listened to, being silenced.
Louie is now the same age as my early memories. I wonder if he will feel the same nervousness in his stomach that I felt when I walked into my new kindergarten class, or the same warm happiness when his teacher smiles at him, or the relief when someone befriends him. I have to be careful to let him have his own experiences. I know we are not perfect parents, and some measure of childhood angst is inevitable, but I hope he and Darren will always share with me their mythic experience of the world.
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