On Memory and Motherhood

Return to homepage at AmberKinser.com

This post is about memory.  About how critical it is to understanding family life, about how “wrong” it is, about how it differs so sharply from family member to family member.  I use to put great stock in my recollections of my childhood.  I used to recite narratives about what happened and what people said and who was responsible and even why people did what they did, as if I had any access whatsoever to the why’s of other people’s actions, especially as a child.  I used to tell these tales with fair confidence. They were true because I remembered them.  But I don’t do that so much anymore.  Even when I’m explaining moments form my past to my therapist, I usually mention something about a grain of salt and not quite a grain of faith in my recollections.  I don’t know if it’s feeling more and more like a grownup, or if it’s my exposure to my own kids’ narratives that occasion me to tell my tales with reservation, but I’m learning that family memories are a peculiar thing.

One of the harsh realities of mothering I think is that our children use this peculiarity of memory as a significant guiding force in how they understand who they are and who we are and the choices we made that shaped their lives, even though none of our memories may be particularly ‘accurate’ and few of them in synch with each others’ memories.  Our kids remember shared events differently than we do; sometimes these differences are stunningly absolute.  And yet their narratives of these events are what will guide their lives; not the ‘accuracy’ of the details or how well their version meshes with ours.  I remember falling asleep exhausted as I read picture books to my daughter, and wondering as I garbled the words in semi-consciousness whether she’d recall that we went through stacks of library books each summer, or that I lost consciousness halfway through them. The answer, as it turns out, is she seems to remember neither.  My son mentioned recently that we always say we’re going to get him a bike for his birthday in June and then never do.  I reminded him that it is HE who says he wants a bike in April and May practically every year, and then by June he’s decided he wants something else.  I suspect that his version of being annually denied the bike is the one that will stick in his narratives.  My daughter remembers walking home many times in the dark from karate class while in junior high; she actually walked home once, at dusk.  My son says we always say we’re going to go camping and never do.  I say we DID go camping, him and his sister and me, quite a lot in fact; but now his two weeks at summer camp knocks out 40% of his summer break given his year-round school, and he has made clear that he is in no mood for more camping.  And I’m in no mood for cajoling unwilling participants at the campground, I’ll tell you that.

In a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago,  I mentioned one my father’s evening rants, which included storming down the hallway, flicking on the light, shouting “and another thing!” and scolding us about that other thing, to be followed by another thing, and another thing, in sequence.  My sister read this post and swears that this script was performed by my mother, not my father, and confirmed this with our other sister. I have distinct memories of fearing my dad’s hallway rants so that’s the recollection that sticks for me, but I don’t make much ado about narrative accuracy any more. I do fear though, the more profound ways in which my children’s narratives of their lives with me implicate me in ways that go beyond picture book and birthday bicycle memories, venture into “you never” and “you always” memories, and move wholly out of synch with the memories I thought I was shaping for them.  How our children narrate their lives is an element of mothering over which we finally have no control.  And letting go of the desire for it is one the greatest challenges of motherhood for me.

 

No Dignity

Return to homepage at AmberKinser.com

So I’m walking into Sam’s Club the other day, a store that already I don’t much care for. Something about lots of giant containers of things, “vats” of mayonnaise and peanut butter and big boxes of breakfast sandwiches that take up too much room in the pantry and the fridge and freezer but that may make us savvy shoppers, my partner is convinced, and that make us major contributors to a consumerist culture, I am convinced. But anyway, I’m walking into Sam’s and I see this woman with a toddler in her arms sitting at one of the tables over in the eating area in the front of the store. She is holding the child’s butt up to her nose so she can sniff it and then, after not acquiring the evidence she sought, looks down into it diaper to see if she can locate a mess down there. “There is no dignity in mothering, I swear,” I said to myself.

Now, I remember those days well. I remember doing those diaper checks and that, of the two options, being a toddler butt-sniffer is preferable to getting a gander at all that nastiness down in that diaper. I don’t remember choosing that option at the front of a store, quite in front of people who were buying vats and cases of food but hell, I can’t swear, with any degree of accuracy, that I never did it. That stuff all just gets so interwoven with the rest of the demands of mothering — reasonable and un — that the less dignified of one’s tasks don’t even stand out anymore.

I remember being in the regular grocery store, quite content as I put my groceries on the register belt because my toddler son was quite content — and I really needed him to be that way right there while we were confined at the register — because he was playing with my wallet. A bad idea, I know, but he was occupied and I was so grateful of that simple fact for just a few minutes. As I put the last item on the belt I turn my attention to him only to find that he is chewing my very best photo of the two of us, the photo I take out and show people of my sweet little boogie who I now would rather like to throttle. I remember saying with tears in my eyes, “My God, nothing is sacred.” I’ve since taken that photo out once (only once) to show someone, mangled as it was, and thereafter retired the photo to a wallet location not seen by anyone but me.

As I’m writing, I’m thinking I have some of my least favorite memories at the grocery store. Excluded from these, mind you, is the one about my daughter following me down the aisle with her new and shiny and red and loud tap shoes. This never became a memory because that image came to me while I was at the store seriously considering buying them for her just for “fun” but luckily, that horrible image — me exhausted and trying to think and plan, and her tap tap tapping away behind me — prevented me from making a decision I’d surely regret; I hid the shoes up on a high shelf.

So I saved myself from that one but there were other memories. Like my children coming up to me complaining of various itching body parts — identifying them by their proper anatomical name — which, you may want to know throws strangers off guard a bit. There was the day when I was in the middle of painting my daughter’s room a hideous shade of pink, to my dismay, and I was in cutoffs and looking not particularly fit for human consumption but she, she was in a golden gown and elbow-length black gloves and big hat, the latter two of which my friend, who I then would rather have liked to throttle, bought her. So she has this getup on and I’ve got paint and cutoffs on (does anyone say “cutoffs” anymore? does anyone actually wear them?) and she will have no part of any plan to change her clothes, so the two of us set off for a paint re-supply at Lowe’s. Her walking slowly so that everyone could get a good look, all these older women telling her how lovely she looked, her telling them that she knew this, and me really trying to get in and out of the store wholly undetected but alas to no avail.

There’s the time that she was passing around these stickers — sparkly little bears on skateboards — and had us all put one on. My mother was talking with a woman over at her church later that day and remarked to herself that the woman seemed to have “the fakest smile” she’d ever seen. When my mother got in the car and looked in the rearview mirror she realized that she still had that stupid sticker on her cheek. No dignity.

There’s the time I started lactating right before I went to class because I had called home to check on my son and heard him crying in the background and the milk began to flow to comfort him. This would have been fine if I’d been at home rather than walking into a college classroom, soaked at the breasts, to teach. The list goes on, of course — my son nearly climbing over the restaurant booth which I’m too tired to care about much but the strangers into whose booth he is crawling seem to; the dentist telling me that my elementary school-aged son is a “real talker” (OMG, what was he telling you?). This post is really just too short to really capture the humiliation of it all. But I’ll bet, if you’re a mother and reading this, you know what I’m talking about. It’s harsh terrain, motherhood.

BIO: Dr. Mama (Amber Kinser) is a writer, feminist mother, professor, and speaker who lives in Tennessee. Check her out on Facebook, follow her on Twitter @DrMamaWit, and see her webpage. Kinser writes for the MamaBlogger365 series each Thursday at the Museum Of Motherhood, Mamapalooza and Mamazina Magazine.

Support MamaBlogger365 and help the Museum of Motherhood secure a permanent home in 2011!