What a Drag It Is Getting Old

I just sat here for about five minutes trying to remember what it was I was going to write about.  I had started to write it in my head this morning—always a mistake to not write it down.  I’m sure all my best ideas have been lost to malfunctioning, inept, or rotting neurons. 

The great irony?   It was, of course, about forgetting.  Or rather, forgetting being the key developmental milestone of aging.  There comes a time, in life, when the developmental firsts are fewer and farther between.

Initially in life, they come so quickly, one can hardly keep up—holding one’s head up independently, rolling over, grabbing at objects, sitting up unassisted, up on all fours, crawling, pulling up, standing, stepping, walking all over your parents.  Not to mention the verbal milestones…babbling, sounds in imitation, first words, two-word phrases, sentences....

Then, they slow down.  Baby books are abandoned.  The first tooth is lost.  The first word is read.  And then many years later, the first period, first kiss…first heartbreak.  And as you make your way into your twenties they come even more slowly…the first job, the first apartment, the first marriage.  All this while, you’re still growing, still developing in important ways. 

And then suddenly you aren’t.  Suddenly you find yourself saying to your daughter:

“Sophia, can you please help me find the raspberries.  I know I had half a box of them.  I gave you some in your lunch this morning, and then I put the rest of them away.  But I can’t find them for the life of me.”

Sophie peeks into the fridge, lackadaisically moves an item or two and says, “I don’t see them either, Mom.”

I keep looking, exasperated.  What the hell could I have done with them?  Five minutes later, after a fruitless search, I give up.

The next day, I’m making breakfast and I open up one of the cabinets.  There, sitting atop the dishes are the raspberries, room temperature, but in tact.  I feel a touch of panic in my stomach.  I have started to go backwards.  I have developmental decay. 

Isn’t this how it started for my grandmother?  She thought people were coming out of her television to steal her food.  That’s what she said, once we started noticing something was wrong.  Once we intervened.  What came before that?  What were the earliest signs? I show Kevin the raspberries and make him promise, for the third time that month, that he will change my diapers, when, inevitably, I will no longer be able to control my bodily functions. 

“It’s just stress.  You’re doing too much,” Kevin assures me, adding the raspberries to his cereal. 

“You’re evading the question.” I note.  “Just say yes.”

“Yes,” says Kevin, rolling his eyes, and, likely crossing his fingers behind his back.  I just know he is going to put me in a home. 

Since that time, when I have an episode of forgetting—I misplace my keys, I can’t remember why I walked into the room, I forget to go to the gymnastics make up class I scheduled because I forgot to take Sophie to the original gymnastics class, Kevin smirks and says, “Raspberries!” 

Easy for him to say, as he has yet to break 40, and to my knowledge, has never left fruit where it doesn’t belong.  I give him my most exasperated smile, but underneath I feel a twinge of fear.  I just was getting the hang of life.  I’m not ready to start aging. 

Oh, I suppose there are still many firsts ahead—but I’m ready to stop running towards the next milestone.  I spent so many years wanting to grow up, to be older and able to do more.  Now, here I am—making up the rules, paying the bills, calling the shots—and I want to push pause.  Not go back, but stand still and enjoy life in the middle. 

What Will She Remember?

A friend of mine justified the parental labor of some onerous activity designed mostly for the pleasure of children (i.e. traveling the length of the state to the shore, which requires packing a great deal of equipment and a high tolerance for in-transit sibling warfare): “we’re making memories.”

I tried to use this tactic with my husband, in attempt to lure him to the beach (which he experiences as a series of sensory impingements—the grit of the sand, the slime of the sunscreen, the beating of the sun on his perspiring brow). He immediately dismissed this notion without further explanation. “I don’t buy into that.” I make a mental note to ask him why not when I felt less invested in his response.

All this got me thinking…what will Sophia remember? How much does it matter that we do our best to fill our children’s days with joyful experiences? What kind of an impact does it have? Why do I bother?

My own memories of childhood are spotty at best. I cannot remember the daily experience of having my mother at home when I was a young child. The odd bits of tape I have in my mind are ones fraught with emotion: the humiliation of noticing that my neighbor was watching me from a tree as I squatted next to my baby pool to pee; the fear I felt running up the street screaming for my mother after watching one of the neighborhood boys step into a bees nest and suffer 82 bee stings; the disappointment upon receiving my first kiss, planted on my lips by a wet-mouthed second-grader deep in the recesses of our spare-room closet. There are good memories, but they too have a deep emotional resonance: visits from my New York cousins who transformed our living room into an imaginary swamp full of alligators that nipped at our feet as we sought refuge on the cough; after years of lessons, suddenly finding myself able to swim in our manmade township lake, with no one around to help or bear witness to my moment of triumph; my father quietly waking me in the middle of the night and leading me out onto a cold Cape Cod beach to watch a meteor shower; we held hands as the sky sung with stars.

All of these memories were forged out of intensity, none were planted or planned.

In the calm of the morning, I asked Kevin, “What is it about the idea of ‘making memories’ that you were so opposed to the other day?” He explained that he wasn’t against going to the shore, per se, not if were going with the intent of having fun as a family. However, he was not interested in creating an experience for the sake of having a picture of it. He didn’t want the intent of forming a memory to trump being in the moment.

Made sense to me.

It is easy to confuse images with memory. There are some things I “remember” only because we have pictures. I am grateful for these pictures, for without them, I would make sweeping generalizations about an otherwise barren landscape. I would only understand those years through the lens of now. The knowledge of the past I possess in the present. But my childhood is not Sophia’s.

I want her to not need pictures. I want her to emerge from these years with the sense that she had a wonderful childhood, whether she remembers the specifics of the day-to-day, or not.

More than once, I have listened to an interview on the radio during which the person being interviewed said something like, “I had an idyllic childhood.” I felt envy creeping through me. This envy is my motivation.

Every day, I do my best, if not to create specific memories, then to create a context of joy. When it occurs to me, I pull out my camera and snap pictures that capture thin slices of this joy. But even if no record existed, I am hopeful that the feeling will be encoded in her brain, etched deep in her neurons. That she will be someone, someday who can toss off the words, “I had a lovely childhood.”

It may be that she won’t remember a damn thing. That she’ll have to dig through digital recordings of parades and playdates and parties to piece together her past. But perhaps she will take experiences from the relationships she enjoys now…with me, with Kevin, with our relatives, friends and neighbors and carry them forth to her relationships in the future. And she will be happy.