Musings on memory and reflection and the stories we tell

I’m struggling to stay focused this week. I’m struggling to get things done. At home, at work, even on this blog. I am managing to spend way too much money though.

I’m distracted by the fires in Maui, partly because I was just there and know those areas so well. Partly because our friends are still there (not in the Lahaina area thank god, but on the island).

Things between my husband and I better. We’ve had some interesting conversations lately. One was about our relationship and parenting and how our dynamics changed during the pandemic. In my mind, the pandemic fundamentally altered our marriage (for the better!). My husband started stepping up around the house and with the kids in ways he never had before. I recognized and appreciated everything he was doing (because I was there to see it!) and much of the resentment I felt previously melted away. He also started feeling overwhelmed and wasn’t happy. I remember thinking, they always suggest ways to get your husband to help more, but they never mention that once he does he might be unhappy and resentful himself. At some point, the pandemic made his dream job into something he hated and he started feeling a lot of despair around that, so much so that I think he forgets that originally it was stuff at home that was making him unhappy.

I brought up my thoughts around all this delicately, but even when I eventually said things bluntly he just didn’t recognize my narrative at all. He doesn’t think the pandemic has anything to do with where we are now as parents or as partners. He thinks other, subtler changes led to all the ways we grew together over these past four years. I find it fascinating that we have such different understandings of that time, that our narratives of the same events diverge so completely. I guess this is why it’s so important to recognize the stories we tell ourselves, because they are ultimately stories, and even when two people are experiencing the same things, they can be understanding them in vastly different ways.

This reminds me of one of the only actual lessons I remember from high school. In 9th or 10th grade history, our teacher staged an outburst in class. Only the kid who was a part of it knew it was staged. I forget exactly what the pretext of the outburst was, but I remember there was yelling and the teacher slammed a textbook on the kid’s desk for the finale. Immediately afterward we were told to write down what had happened. And then we shared what we had witnessed.

Of course everyone had different understandings of what had taken place. The students closest to the altercation heard what was being said, or parts of it. Those of us farther away added a lot of conjecture, because we had missed key moments. Some people included what a neighbor mentioned seeing or hearing in their own account. It was clear that even in that small room, with so few people witnessing the moment, we would be hard pressed to agree on what happened.

Then we talked about how history is made up of incomplete accounts, and even if you strip away the biases and motivations of the people who relate it, it can never be an honest interpretation of what transpired, because it will always be just that, an interpretation. I was so naive back then, because while I knew that what we should question certain topics, like our country’s treatment of Native and Black people among other things, I hadn’t ever thought that the even uncontroversial history we learned might be incomplete, or straight out incorrect. I’m sure if someone had explained to me how and why it was I would have understood, but learning it like that, in real time with an actual experience, drove the lesson home.

And now I’m learning that lesson again, because history is not just what we read in textbook about the world, it’s also being written in our own homes. Every day we experience moments together that each of us processes different. We tell ourselves stories that we think are common knowledge, but that really no one else shares. And yet we go about our business assuming they do.

When my daughter turned 12 last year I was fixated on the fact that my most salient memories start from my 13th year. I have plenty of memories before that, but my guess is they are based on photos and family lore. Once I turned 12 though, I stored more and more memories that we’re mine alone, that were not caught on camera or shared later during family gatherings. I have watched my daughter this past year, wondering what she is taking with her from this time, into the future. Surely so many memories with friends, and probably a lot with us, her family. It’s crazy to think that even the memories we “share” have probably been stored in ways that would make them unrecognizable.

I also wonder what I will remember from this time. I have this blog, and tens (hundreds?) of thousands of photos. I even have thousands of videos – snippets really, but enough to jog my memory. But I have all that from when they were younger too, and mostly when I look back at them I’m struck by how little I remember from those first years of their lives. Even their voices are foreign to me – if I heard them out of context I don’t think I could I identify them. And on the rare occasions that I look back at my first blog, I’m struck by how raw the posts were, and how the narratives present in those posts have morphed for me over time. Probably just the retelling of my life, on my blog, has changed the way I remember it.

There are actually memories from before I was 12 that I remember well – and they are memories of Hong Kong. My best friend and I both moved away when we were 12, and we wrote each other long letters mostly recollecting our time together in a place that was so different from our homes in the US. I think it was that reminiscing about out time together in Hong Kong, in the years immediately following, that have allowed me to retain those years of my life so saliently.

Similarly, I have talked a lot with other women about the pandemic and how it changed our family dynamic so dramatically. I’ve processed it through those tellings and retellings, refining it into a highly polished understand of what happened. I highly doubt my husband has ever participated in a similar kind of conversation with his friends. I wonder too how that has added to our divergent understands of that strange time we shared.

I hope all of this reflection will help me to be very mindful about the stories I tell myself, and all of you. In a way, I’m making a memory every time I hit “publish.” It’s up to me to decide which stories withstand the test of time.