The Value of Forgetting
Talking with a young mom this week I was reminded why we forget things. She told me how she watched her two year old insist on eating a raw egg yolk with his fingers, how her four year old tried to flush the doilies and a table runner down the toilet. The doilies went down okay, the table runner got stuck and they had to call a plumber. And for some reason her newborn daughter, who she had prayed for every time she was pregnant, "Please give me a girl," spent the whole day crying.
"What was wrong," I asked. "With the baby that is." I didn't need an explanation on the tenacity and determination of two boys. They had enough energy to power a nuclear plant.
"I have no idea," she answered speaking of her daughter. "After I did everything I could think of, including carrying her around for hours, she fell asleep. I think she just finally wore herself out. Do babies cry just to release energy?" she asked.
"I'm not sure. I never quite figured that one out," I said. I had a child that cried for the first four years of life, at least that's how I remember it. I thought she'd be crying all the way to fifteen and decided I had better get used to it and resign myself to a life of suffering. Just as I was settling in for the long haul, she changed. I promised myself to ask what it was all about when she got older. I figured, being there on the inside, she might have some insight and be able to enlighten me. I could then take that information to other parents and make a bundle of money selling the insight and solution.
When my daughter reached her teens, I asked, "Why did you cry so much?"
"I don't know." She said.
Too bad! There goes my bundle of money.
When my young mother friend shared her woes, I laughed. I can do that now, because I'm past the stage of those experiences. Throughout all my formal years of study, including the early years of University I used to complain to God, "Why didn't you give me a better memory?" Now I know why. It's so I could forget all the years of crying from a challenging child. The other child was sweet, nice, and easy - a textbook baby. Something would go wrong - I'd go to the book - and there I'd find the answer. No one ever wrote a book telling me how to handle my first-born, no books that I found anyway, and believe me, I found and read them all.
My challenging child gave me a run for the money. Actually, I wish there had been a pile of money at the end of raising her because she would have been worth the prize, the ribbon, or whatever it is they give parents who endure and constantly face challenges with creative solutions.
The memory? The reason we forget things is so we won't be saddled with the burden and weight of it all, so when they do grow up we can look at the child with a sense of pride and love instead of remembering the feces covered wall (an experiment at finger painting), or all the vegetables taken from the fridge and laid out in a line in the driveway so her father could crush them when he drove the car home, or how she took all the cereal from the cupboards and spread it about the kitchen making it look like something had exploded, or how she took all her baby sister's clothes and scattering them in the yard. Was she trying to tell me something?
The antics didn't stop as she grew, they just changed, like the time she climbed out the bedroom window to kiss the neighbourhood boy goodnight. (Yeah, I knew about that too.)
There is a reason why we don't remember some things. The only reason I remembered them now is because of my young friend. I can laugh because I'm not immersed in the pain of overwork and frustration as she is. Those things have spilled away, and I forget.
The one thing I did learn from all those childhood antics, is that children need to explore their world. They aren't born with a book of rules on how to drive parents to the brink of destruction with creative moves. They were born with an innate desire to explore, to seek out new things, to test their environment, just as we were born with the innate ability to forget.
Ever wonder why grandparents are so much fun? They forget what it was like to raise their own children, just as we forget and only remember the angelic faces that now stand before us.