The Gloss of Time

Parenting young children leaves so little time for self-reflection. It is immediate, active and often chaotic, and when it is not, there is everything else to be done. But every once in a while I find myself wondering what my children will think of me, now, when they are grown. In other words, how will they remember me at this time in my life?

As I lay in bed beside Lily tonight, reading her goodnight story and letting my mind wander as much as I could while reading, I found myself thinking about the surprise party my mother threw for my father when he turned 30. This is one of my earliest, if hazy memories. When my dad turned 30 I was just 3. I don't remember seeing photographs of this event, and it's not the subject of family lore, so I trust my hazy memories more than I do those of the morning my father cut off his finger in the lawnmower, for example, which I really only "remember" because we have talked about it so much.

This party, though. It was winter; my father's birthday is at the end of November. I remember the door opening: a blast of cold air and a black sky. It was night, which maybe I remember because it must have been late for me to be up? He had been at a basketball game, or playing basketball; I remember basketball, but maybe I am conflating memories here. There was an awful lot of basketball in those days. Was there a poker table with a green felt top? My mother's hair was very blonde and flipped out at the ends. My father's hair was dark and thick. The clearest image is of his face, a crinkling around the eyes, a smile.

That's it. I don't remember guests or music or food or even being allowed to stay awake and watch; I don't know if I was. But to think now that they were 30--almost a decade younger than I am now--and that I was a fully actualized little girl with the capacity to notice my father's smile, remember it, is both thrilling and terrifying to me. Today, for example, right now as I sit at my desk, I am afraid that I will be crystallized in Lily's mind in these hideous black culottes that are stretchy and were tolerable to those who know me well during my last trimester and C-section recovery but are long overdue for a trip to an incinerator. Will she remember me with my unbrushed hair pulled back into a messy bun with a stretched-out elastic and purplish circles under my eyes? (The last time I saw my father he kept saying, "Is there something wrong with your skin? Under your eyes?" until my mother finally heard and snapped, "I think she's tired, Joel," shutting him up.)

And that's just the physical. Will she recall our ongoing exchange de jour, where she ignores me or does something she's not supposed to do, I reprimand or call attention to the ignoring or misbehaving, she bursts into tears and yells, "Just stop yelling at me, Mama. Just stop all the yelling," as though my being pushed to the brink has nothing whatsoever to do with her and is rather causing her undue distress? Will she remember that? Will I?

The funny thing is that I sort of think she won't. Not really. And I'm not sure I will either. Memory is so cagey. It condenses everything and then filters it out as it chooses, selectively, of course, in slices. And my memories of my parents are mostly scenes: this party, and then more clear and concrete scenes as I get older, and they do: the time my mother poured a cup of water on my father's head in the old kitchen, my father weeding in the garden, my mother sitting with her friend on the patio in front of the house, scraping wallpaper off of the walls. I remember many times they were kind: my father bringing me a Fribble when I had mono and a painful sore throat, my mother staying up late, late, late on a work night to help me finish a report on Clipper ships. (Why? Why Clipper ships?) And I remember fights: my father wandering the grounds of my high school because I was five minutes late to meet him, my mother, cold, refusing to get involved in a sibling battle, a stolen headband, idiocy.

But I realize, as I write this, that my memories are kind, less judgmental than I imagine I felt at the time, feel so often now. I remember the atmosphere more than the incidents, the sense of being loved. That, I think, is finally something to strive for.