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Recording
My friend asked if I started speaking early and seemed rather surprised when I told him that I really hadn't the faintest. He inquired if this was from a lack of curiosity on my part, and I admitted that this isn't the kind of information that my family registers. We live pretty much in the moment, which is why we all pack for trips the day we leave. My friend thought I might give it a shot so when my mother called in the evening I quizzed her and not surprisingly, I was right. She told me that she could remember the funny things I used to say and then asked when kids actually start talking so she could have a sense of what "early" speech would be. Since I had no idea what that would be, the conversation quickly moved onward and upward.
The fact of the matter is that I don't come from a family of "recorders." There are few photos of all of us, and even fewer of them make any sense. (Some rather fascinating images of the links of a chain fence with a little athletic blur behind them that is my brother playing baseball prompted a friend of mine once to suggest I have a photography intervention for my parents.) We never had baby books or anything organized.
Now, I have never questioned the blank spots. It's wonderful that there's only a brief record of my teenage years, and I can only recall being frustrated with my parents not knowing the details of my infancy well when I was briefly interested in astrology and no one could remember what time of day I was born. ("It was a respectable hour. Does that help?")
Needless to say I've inherited these tendencies, but this doesn't keep me from feeling a bit uncomfortable when I see the photo displays friends have made of the progress of their families, and there is an inevitable twinge of self-recrimination when I see those plastic folders that make information storage foolproof. I could have gotten a baby book chock-full of prompts, so I wouldn't have to think hard; all I'd have to do is scribble in the blanks. These books are all over the place. I have my pick of any number of them on the cloying to charming continuum.
But instead I have this book full of clean, unlined pages that I try to remember to write in. There is no way this book will ever get filled. I like the idea of having a record, but doing anything about this appeal might be beyond me.
When I was pregnant, and periodically during these first months, people often asked about my history, or that of my mother as a way to try to gauge the future. Were my mother's pregnancies hard or easy? If she didn't have morning sickness, it was less likely that I would. Did I talk early? Maybe my child would too.
There is entertainment in this kind of excavation, but with all the casual information about child development and progress that gets kicked around these days, these details seem almost significant, almost like something that would go into a medical history. Occasionally I wonder if my casual approach might cause me to lose or forget something that might be important someday.
But I am my parents' child and it is unlikely some kind of organizational conversion will happen with any long-term success. I'll collect the information my kid will need for things like passports and other official documents and keep it someplace where it is unlikely to get lost for long. And I'm working on the minimum, writing down in the mostly blank book, the few things that I think he may ask about someday. What his first words were. How old he was when he learned to walk. Happily, should he ever want to get his stars done when he's in high school, I will know what time he was born. Among the best baby presents Felix received was a picture frame with all of his birth vitals engraved on it. There's a big business in newborn statistics. If only preserving the rest were as easy.
posted by Elise at 7:41 AM
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parodie said...
I must admit that the Baby Book that my mom did keep (full of all those prompts, yes) is something I really value. I love being able to read over all sorts of random facts; my mother didn't really stick to the prompts that well, but I don't know if she would have written anything if they hadn't been there. She also used it as a place to store random little things - the braclet I wore when I was born, the program from my kindergarden christmas pagent, etc. Little things that trigger a flood of memories.
I definitely believe in making it personal, but I also think that memories are important, as are their triggers - this is, arguable, part of the way we build our personal narrative, and thus our identities.
1/22/2006 9:57 PM
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parodie said...