Don’t you just love it when your kids do something sweet and innocently beautiful? Something that you’ll remember for the rest of your life because it was so darn cute and endearing?
Logan crawled into bed with me a couple mornings ago. As I tried to go back to sleep — I’m not quite ready to get going at 6 a.m. like he is — he cuddled up to my back and started petting my hair. Then he said in his little voice (which is still at the same pitch as a toddler’s, even though he’s nearly 4), “I like you. You’re the best mama I ever had.” Awww . . .
Immediately wide awake, I turned over and smushed him to my chest. “I like you too. You’re the best Logan I ever had,” I said. (I can’t say he’s the best son I have since he has a brother, or the best kid that I have, since he has three siblings, so I always stick with the individual kids’ name.)
Of course I felt a certain tenderness toward him all day, recalling how he had taken the typical bitter sting out of the morning for me. I knew I would remember that moment always.
Except that I won’t. I was reminded today of how fast our memories fail us, and seem to deteriorate further with each successive child. I always scoffed at mothers who couldn’t remember which child met X milestone at what age. “How could they forget something that important?” I’d wonder. “I’d never do that.”
Ha! As is typical when we make blanket judgments of others, I have been proven irrevocably wrong.
On the writer’s board that I belong to a mom posted today asking others’ opinions of letting her daughter get her ears pierced. I happily posted my experiences and hit send. Not five minutes later, Rachel walked through the room and I suddenly realized that even though I had just posted that both my twins had their ears pierced at the age of 5, I couldn’t remember for sure if Rachel had or if she had waited.
The horror! I had to ask her, much to my shame. I mean, shouldn’t I remember something like that? She said, incredulously, “No . . . I didn’t get them pierced until I was 8!” with a look that clearly reflected what I was thinking — “Shouldn’t you know that?”
If this were my first transgression, it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but unfortunately, it’s not. Not even close. I have tried to recount experiences with my kids to my sisters, only to be reduced to exclaiming, “Well, I can’t remember which kid it was now!” Finally, I figured out that a generic, “my kids,” did this or “one of the kids” did that works just fine when my faulty memory does not.
In my defense, having twins makes it extra hard to remember who did what, when. So does having two more kids only 18 months apart. You sort of go through this long zombie-like existence, just trying to get through each day without falling asleep while making dinner or forgetting when you last fed the baby. It’s amazingly hard to remember those milestones that we honestly believe at the time will be etched into our memories forever.
It’s quite fortuitous for today’s parents that we have all the chronicling help we can possibly need in the form of blogs, video cameras and digital cameras, not to mention cameras on our cell phones.
That is, if we remember to actually turn them on and use them.
