My memories are fragments now
Motherhood is messing with my memory
My grandmother Sadie passed away five years ago. We were very close. She died during the pandemic so there was a very small funeral that I couldn’t get to. This summer my family gathered to share memories of her: a sort-of memorial, but without the priest (on my father’s insistence; to my mother’s disappointment).
I think about Sadie all the time, I feel her presence often. So I was kind of alarmed when I realized I couldn’t conjure any memories of her that are actual stories: beginning, middle, end… something happening. My memories are all fragments, and treasured ones: the way her laugh sounded; the glimmer in her eyes when she would lean in and ask us for the craic [the gossip]; how she closed her eyes and turned her face to the fleeting Irish sun; the smell of her legendary shortbread baking; her hands on the keys next to mine as she patiently sat through me butchering Chopin on the piano.
I wonder if my memory has become warped since I had my daughter. When I think back on my postpartum period, I can’t fully remember … the baby. I remember the time—again in snippets: the June jasmine blooming in the garden; my milk-stained nursing bra; the folksy playlist I had on repeat; being so tired I got dizzy. But I can’t really remember my daughter’s face or the exact sounds she made.
My main piece of advice to new mothers is to document those delicate early days - journal, record a voice note… maybe it’s futile but I’m hoping my diary entries and audio recordings will let me live inside my own memories in a way that photos won’t. This is my girl laughing when she was seven months old…
There’s a poignant irony here: your kid’s childhood is probably one of the times you want to remember most. But the work of parenting - the mental load, the repetitive labor, the emotional weight of keeping a little person safe - means you always have to be thinking one step ahead. It doesn’t feel like my busy mind is properly committing things to memory.
I recently listened to this interview of Weird Al Yankovic (who knew he’d be super insightful on parenting!) where says he often jokes that it would be great to have his daughter Nina at every age running around the house, like 22 Ninas—because each age is so different and special in its own right. And there’s a sense of loss when that person goes. Weird Al’s idea hit me with more clarity than the vague cliché: “It goes so fast, enjoy every moment.”
Recently my daughter and I had just returned from a transatlantic trip and were adjusting to being back in Pacific time. We both woke up at 2.30am—her: cheerful and bright-eyed, me: sluggish and tired.
I warmed a bowl of porridge and she sat in her high chair eating happily, chatting away, singing to herself. I lay on the sofa watching her, trying to summon the energy for this night wakening.
In my half-asleep state, I imagined she was a sort of visitor from another time. Like I was in the future and two-year-old Hera had come to see me. Suddenly I felt keenly how quickly this incarnation of my girl will grow and disappear—soon she won’t exist, she will be another age and I will miss this toddler dearly.
It filled me with a burst of love and compassion and gentleness in that exhausted moment. I also hope that it might cement my memory of two-year-old Hera, but somehow I doubt it. When I try to nail down a memory, press it into my synapses and will it to stay there, vividly, forever, it slips through my fingers. And I’m left only with fragments, snippets—like Sadie. But maybe that’s ok … maybe knowing how precious these memories are will somehow help ground me, help me exist in the moment that’s right in front of me: my two-year-old girl smearing porridge through her hair in the middle of the night.
