I Will Remember This

My new post for Skirt!

Painter/Animator Jeff Scher posted this video on the NYTimes today called, "You Won't Remember This Either," about his toddler and it is so sweet. I love the Amelie-like music he chose, particularly in the background of his words about parenting. God, I love this quote.

"What continues to amaze me about parenting is how it simultaneously expands and condenses time. The days can seem long, but the months fly by. The kids seem to get older in spurts. One day you notice that he isn’t the same guy he was two weeks ago, he’s someone older and new, but he still wants you to unwrap his cheese stick.

It’s hard to believe they won’t remember any of this in their rush to grow up, but I know they won’t. This film is a collection of fleeting glimpses and little moments that would otherwise escape forever."
--Jeff Scher.

If there is one consistent theme in my storytelling {as a photographer, writer, attorney and mother} it is in trying to collect the details that might otherwise escape forever. Some days, it feels like trying to keep snowflakes: impossible to catalogue it all, or even just the salient details.

At home lately, I am learning that the details that matter most to me are distinguishable from those that matter most to my daughter. Of course her details are different. But now that she can tell me what she loves, fears and enjoys, but is still too young to remember, I feel like I should be double historian, trying to get down on paper or otherwise, what she loved about a day that is separate and apart from what I thought about it. Ultimately, when she gets older, there is part of me that wants her to know both: what she thought and felt at the time, and what I thought, neither of which can completely be contained. We could have a court reporter and film crew follow us around and we could never get back to this place. There would never be one complete and accurate re-telling. No amount of cataloguing can capture it all. In some ways, it is a futile endeavor.

In the opening sequence of the 1998 Great Expectations adaptation, Finn {the Pip character} says:

"There either is or is not a way things are. The color of the day, the way it felt to be a child, the feeling of saltwater on your sunburned legs. Sometimes the water is yellow. Sometimes it's red. What color it may be in memory depends on the day. I'm not going to tell the story the way that it happened. I'm going to tell it the way I remember it."

I love everything about that quote {and the amazing Francesco -that's-fun-to-say- Clemente paintings in the film}. I can only write as I remember it from my point of view which is not the whole picture. But I am coming to believe that there never is or is not a way things are, there is only how each of us remembers it, a million different realities. Now I've started thinking about it in relation to the oral tradition of family storytelling. It's all subjective. Who we were as children and how that information shapes us as adults depends on the storyteller. It seems like another example of how important it is to tell ourselves stories a. in order to live (as Joan Didion describes) and b. to tell ourselves about goodness in ourselves and others.

Doing laundry last night, I saw the stains of our break together: syrup from pancakes and little drops of hot chocolate on shirts. They came out in the wash. Gone. I am not so sentimental that I miss the stains, but I do wonder how I will feel folding up these 3T shirts to give away when they no longer cover her arms. They already seem enormous compared to those 3-6 month onesies that were all over the laundry room just seconds ago. So I write about it here. Or I take a photo. I try to keep them somehow even as the souvenirs are washed away.