On Not Remembering

By Beck

I was busy making breakfasts and school lunches this mornings – and I HATE the time between 7 and 8 am on weekday mornings, really – and I overheard my oldest daughter telling my son how to make bannock.

“You mix together flour, a bit of baking powder and water and some salt,” she was telling him. “You make a rough dough and you cook it in a heavy frying pan with lots of oil.”

The kids had a recent sleepover at my parents’ house, and The Girl helped my dad make supper that night, so I knew where her sudden bannock-making prowess came from. I make a lot of gluten-free frying pan breads, but I don’t make bannock, so much – and bannock around here is most traditionally served with a big peice of fried balogna, should you want to be authentic – and I was charmed to hear her calm voice chanting the ancient recipe. If I hadn’t happened to have been listening, I’d have missed it.

I’m haunted a lot by the idea of missing things as a parent, although I really should relax, I guess – but even though I was certainly present for all of my children’s firsts, I don’t remember them. Maybe if I spent less time with them, important events would be more deeply remembered, but as it is, I don’t remember their first steps, say, aside from knowing that it happened the very day after both The Girl and The Boy’s first birthdays, and that The Baby FINALLY walked at 17 months, to our great relief. And this, this not-remembering, feels rather terrible and at the same time and in equal measures like a great mercy.

I rarely look at my children’s baby photos. There is something harrowingly poignant about the image of their vulnerable baby heads, their little soft reaching baby hands, frozen in time and strangely vanished, and I’m always stricken by the thought that I could have done better, loved more. And so what I’ve carried away instead so far is a series of stories that I tell my kids, little murmured tales – that when The Girl was a baby, we would play at the swings, her face a picture of dubious worry as she’d swing away and relief  as she’d swing back, over and over again, that The Boy was passed from arm to arm in the delivery room, all of the nurses making guesses over how much the hefty little guy weighed.

And now they pass stories down to each other, telling each other what they’ve learned in this world – this is your pinch of salt, this is your handful of flour – and my relief and my blessing must be that I know that in time, all of this will fade to a gentle, half-remembered patina, knowing only that their faces would lift with relief when they saw me, that they always ended up back in my arms again.

Beck blogs at Frog And Toad Are Still Friends.