Remember that really horrible thing you did when you were a kid that you believed would haunt your relationship with your parents forever?
I have good news for you: Your parents probably don’t remember it.
In fact, through research I’ve done in the past few days, I’ve discovered that almost all the details of life — even the most wonderful, spectacular or even truly awful things — are almost completely lost in that weird and complex phenomenon we know as memory.
And maybe that’s a good thing. Forgetting, in fact, may be one of the most important things we do.
This forgettable hypothesis came about after I gently chastised my parents in my last column for forgetting some things I thought were un-erasable moments of my childhood, in particular the moments that I spent kicking my older brother in the back or trying to wriggle out of the resulting chokeholds. How could my parents claim that my brother and I were perfect little angels all the time when I clearly remember the escape routes I had carefully mapped out to help me flee from well-deserved retribution?
A friend of mine read the column and laughed about how she has already forgotten much of the worst shenanigans her young children have gotten into in just the past few years.
I wanted to know if I was suffering from the same amnesia. When that first child is born, parents have an unwavering belief that they will remember every single moment of baby bliss. And there are still some moments that are locked in my brain seemingly forever.
For instance, most parents will never forget their first Total Diaper Failure, an occurrence that still has NASA scientists baffled as to how such a small celestial body can produce such a Big Bang. The first TDF I had to deal with was so traumatic that the building in which it occurred became a code word for all future TDFs.
“Uh oh, honey, you better get over here with the wet wipes and a change of clothes — the baby has just gone full Lougheed Mall. Also, I think we might need to buy a new stroller.”
After hearing from my friend, I realized that I have my own archives that I could dig through to check my hypothesis, to see if I too was forgetting “unforgettable” things. I started writing this column less than a year after my first son was born and I’ve chronicled many parenting adventures along the way. Would looking back at some of those old columns reveal moments I’d long since forgotten? Yes, it turns out.
My first clue came in one of my very first columns. With my first-born son demanding my care and attention, I penned a breakup letter… to beer. How did that go?
Maybe if I had given up beer I would have a better memory for all these wonderful moments. Moments like my older son using his baby brother’s soft spot as a helicopter landing pad. Or the time he chose dinner with the grandparents as the perfect time to start shouting the word “dink.”
Or the younger son, when he reached the age of two, delighting in every chance he got to help his older brother work on some elaborate building block world and then, when it was almost complete, zero
in on the biggest, most intricate structure and knock it down with a wild call of “boom-chick-a-boom!” He knew that violence would follow and he did not care.
I had basically forgotten all of these things.
I’m reminded of the most important forgetting that any parent does: a mom forgetting how excruciating childbirth is.
The final point of this is that if you do want to really “remember” anything — and I mean anything, including that unforgettable first word or adorable first hockey goal — you have to write it down.
Or even better, constantly film your children with your phone. Apparently, if you really need it, my youngest has a flip phone you can borrow.
Andy Prest is sports editor of the North Shore News. / aprest@nsnews.com
