I have a six-month-old. Well, six and a half, as of this writing. As her mother, I can tell you she is gorgeous and incredibly charming and we waited so long for her. I adore looking at her. It’s hard to tear my eyes away from her. It took three years to get her to stick and now that she’s here, she is growing so fast. Just so damn fast. I don’t remember my son growing so fast, although I’m sure he did. But I am older now, so perhaps my perceptions have changed.
When I look at my daughter, I think about my own mortality. I was once a baby like her – not nearly as mind-blowingly beautiful and sweet – all head and cheeks and eyes, everything round and bulging. That was so long ago, but in the blink of an eye, she could be having the same thoughts about her own child.
I’ll be dead someday. Everyone will. It could be tomorrow or it could be in 40 years or more. I hope it will be more. I want to live a very long time as long as I have my faculties about me and am not miserable or in pain. Best case, I won’t even be making anyone else miserable in my old age, but you can’t have everything!
It’s not that I’m afraid of dying, per se. As far as I know, everything just stops and that’s it. What terrifies me, though, is the thought of kicking the bucket before my children are old enough to have any meaningful memories of me or know anything of substance about me.
I used to sing the same songs to my son every time I put him down for a nap or for the night: “Venus,” by Frankie Avalon; “Till There Was You,” the Beatles version; “Sherry Baby,” by Frankie Valli, and “Anything You Want,” by Roy Orbison.
So many of these songs – already “oldies” when I was growing up in the eighties and nineties – were so innocent in their lyrics, it’s not even always clear they’re talking about romantic love. It’s easy to adapt them or sing them just as they are to children. Early rock n’ roll is the best for singing along.
I performed this obsessive ritual from the time he was in utero, not only because I love these songs and to help my son know it was time for bed, but also because I had this sentimental notion that if something happened to me, these songs would be so ingrained in my children that they would hear them and react physically somehow – get a warm fuzzy feeling of being loved – of knowing they are truly loved, even if they don’t remember by whom exactly.
My son just turned six, so I think I’m out of the woods with him. Whatever happens now, he knows who I am. Still, I have no plans of going anywhere and now my goal has morphed into wanting to live long enough to explain to him about the world and what happens in it, about myself, and my life – things he’s too young to fully grasp right now.
When I gaze at my daughter until my eyes start to cross, I am struck by how unimaginable she is to me as a twenty-something young woman. I’ll be in my sixties then and I can’t imagine that either. She does not exist to me yet as a person who speaks in understandable sentences, let alone as someone who has her own fully developed personality, sexuality, desires that aren’t related to my boobs, goals, etc…
I can’t wait to see what she’ll be like when she gets more hair, walks, talks, makes friends, creates art, discovers something new. And yet, I know that just as I cannot see the future her now, I’ll never see the past hers in the present or in any future presents. I frequently remind myself that I am NOT in a hurry. Every stage is miraculous, even if there are some challenges to go along with them. Make that a lot of challenges.
My son as a baby and a toddler and a four year old only exists for me in pictures now. I know he was a stunningly gorgeous baby, but I can’t really remember him exactly as he was. No amount of staring was enough to seer those images or sequences of images accurately enough into my brain.
Of course I have memories, but they are hazy and disordered now. I want my memories of him in HD – the highest possible resolution.
I want to relive the full sensory experience of smelling my children’s heads, kissing their firm round cheeks, running my fingers over their luscious smooth skin, having nonsense conversations with them 20 or 30 or 40 years from now. But I can’t.
My newborn daughter is no more. She’s six months old, closing in on seven fast. Her shoulders lost that gloriously silky fuzz months ago. The bird legs that didn’t fill up the loose skin she was born in and the tiny feet that were too small even for newborn socks are now plump and full to bursting. She’s got new sparkling translucent blonde hair. She’s eating solids, or trying to. She lifts her butt up during tummy time like she’s got plans to go somewhere real soon. Too soon for me, quite frankly. How can she do that already?
How can my baby boy be learning to read and doing math in his head like a human computer? How can he already be such a promising artist? How can he already be grappling with complex questions about social justice and how the brain and heart function? How can he already understand what bad words are and that they are only OK in certain settings?
They say to enjoy the time you have with them. Make the most of every moment. I’m trying. But it’s not good enough. I take pictures, enough to capture memories without missing out on the moment by messing with my camera the whole time. I hate it when I realize I’m unnecessarily experiencing the present moment through the screen of my phone instead of directly with my eyeballs.
My fear of forgetting is a big part of the reason I write. For a couple of decades now, I’ve kept track of jokes and anecdotes I didn’t want to let fade into oblivion in my mind. Telling the story of someone I love helps me remember and make the memories stronger. Remembering a touching moment through writing is probably the closest I can ever get to having my HD memory experience.
How do you keep hold of your most treasured memories?
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