I often wonder what my daughter will remember of her childhood. How much of all of this day-in day-out-ness is truly "sticky," and how much of it is like torrents of clear water lightly rippling over and past her, leaving little to nothing behind?
I’ve been thinking about this more lately, perhaps because my own memory seems so objectively flawed and twisted. I have some truly weird, freaky memories of childhood, and have come to think of myself as a dubious source of factual information regarding my own experience. I mean, sure, I tell a good story (to myself), but how much of that shit really happened? Some of my childhood recollections are clearly fanciful fabrications, while some tread that thin border between the imagined and the possible. Still, they all seems so real, so much like actual remembrances of things past, that I have a hard time sorting out the things that really happened from the things that I imagined really happened.
For example, I vividly remember, during one particularly bad thunderstorm when I was around M’s age, sitting in front of my second floor bedroom window watching a Manhattan-skyscraper-sized giant — a figure plucked straight from a fairy tale book, wearing beige sackcloth rags that were clearly of Middle-Ages vintage — stomp past our neighborhood. And as bizarre and unreal as it sounds, this feels, in my mind, like a regular memory to me, no different from common childhood recollections of playing in the backyard and slurping popsicles in summertime. The clarity of the imagined memory is indistinguishable from my "real" memories.
So what does this say about memory, then?
Back when I was in Grad School studying Literature, we often talked about the various kinds of narrators present in novels and stories, and debated whether or not they were "trustworthy." When I first started studying Lit seriously in my undergraduate days, this new approach was startling — to think that we should question the honesty and reliability of the authoritative voice telling the story, that we were supposed to wonder if perhaps this narrator person wasn’t trying to sell a version of reality that suited them or supported their cause(s) — it was revelatory. As I continued on in my MA and PhD studies it became second-nature to think critically about who was telling a story and why, what they might be adding or omitting, always recognizing that the act of creating any sort of narrative from experience invariably involves all manner of tweaking.
This way of seeing ultimately became part of the way I operate outside of school and books, and I’m always aware that we each see the world through two eyes that are distinctly our own, imperfect and filtered. Even when telling what we believe to be True and Real, we are really only providing an interpretation, an impressionist painting of the objective world rendered in our own unique brushwork.
So maybe "real" and "imagined" aren’t so far apart, and maybe I shouldn’t care so much about making those separations. I’m not saying I really saw a giant when I was five or anything, just that perhaps our memories are more infused with our imagination than we think, and that this doesn’t necessarily falsify them, or make them any less "true." Honestly, I hope M’s memories, her version of the truths of her childhood, are packed to the gills with imagination — talking flowers, flitting fairies, stomping giants — whatever, you name it. Maybe even more than "reality" or "fact," I want her to remember a world alive with hidden magic and bright with possibility — a world like the one I still hold fading shards of in my own memory, the world I lost when I had to grow up.
