Remember that really horrible thing you did when you were a young 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’s already forgotten much of the worst shenanigans her young children have gotten into in just the past few years. She was living under the impression that her older child was much calmer than her younger one, and it was only by revisiting a journal she kept that the “loud screams and chaos” of the first-born came back to life.
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. I still recall the WTF OMG magic of the moment that my oldest son popped into the world and made his first sound. And I still recall holding him while he slept for hours on end and, when he was asleep on his own, playing that classic game all new parents know well: Is The Baby Still Breathing?
Most parents will also 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 Total Diaper Failure 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. Yes it would.
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. LOL. How did that go?
Come to think of it, 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 completely forgotten all of these things.
It’s not just the bad stuff either. I forgot how my older son used to call basketball “ba-de-bah,” and any time he would slam the ball in he would yell “donk!”
Or how my younger son would open my old flip phone and pretend to make business calls, screaming gibberish for 13 seconds, waiting patiently for an answer and then flipping it closed with a curt “bye.”
I forgot all those cherished “memories” years ago, the recollection only returning upon re-reading old columns.
I’m reminded of the most important forgetting that any parent does. They say that a mother has an incredible ability to forget just how excruciating childbirth is. If the pain lasted forever, no woman would ever go back for more of that, and every human ever born would be an only child. No siblings to play with? We’d have to fire all of the world’s ER doctors.
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 the sports editor for the North Shore News and writes a biweekly humour/lifestyle column. He can be reached via email at [email protected].
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