Of Forgetting

I think about it every once in awhile, the fact that my daughter will never know the me I am right now.  In a couple of years she will begin to form opinions of her mother - something more than the mental snapshots she is currently gathering, moments that she won't know why she remembers, but are there for some reason, like the memory I have of sitting at our kitchen counter in a two-story apartment in California while my mom made dinner and I held a tiny ladle in my hands - I couldn't have been much older than Micaiah and I don't know anything significant about that day or that dinner, and, yet, I remember. 

Relationships, though, those don't get stored in the mental hard-drive until later down the road.  And by the time she is forming real memories of who her mom is, I will already be a completely different person than I am now.  The grass will have grown taller.  I hope, of course, that it's all for the better and that it's the rough parts that get forgotten, smoothed out for remembrance-sake.  But, for the most part, she won't remember these days of rolling glitter balls on the floor, arguing about using the potty or drawing her first "smiley" face.  If we were to move soon, she may not recall the bright turquoise walls of her room handcrafted from tissue paper and ModPodge by her parents and grandparents.  Or the little tree out front, budding more with every spring, surrounded by Irises that she likes to draw on with her sidewalk chalk.

And Emmett - he won't remember how his sister lovingly sought a paci anytime he was upset or warded off any stranger who wanted to tickle his chin or even just look at him.  He won't have memories of her climbing onto the rungs of his crib to peek over at him when he'd just woken up from a nap.

All of these days, these moments, these events I cherish so much, will not exist in their personal accounts of their own history.  Our lives, by the time they're old enough to store away memories, may be completely different than how they started out.  And they won't even know it (until they read this blog, of course).

It kind of blows my mind.