as promised...

I read somewhere that all children mythologize their birth. I don’t believe this to be true in all cases, I rather think I’ve met some folks who, now down and out, think of that time as an inconvenience to their parents and a disappointment to others. I find it hard to relate things that I’ve only heard and not seen, or seen but didn’t remember, then heard at family gatherings time and time again, each time etched more immortally within my own personal story. I definitely have an issue of it and if I ever write my story, how much of it was told to me as opposed to those times I lived, felt and believed. Most definitely my babyhood is all filtered through the minds, beliefs and story-telling powers of my relatives.

While I don’t believe all of us think our arrivals as front-page news, I do think that each of us, in our own way, would take the chance if offered to go back in time and experience our first months of life. That time when, even though we’re living, we have no recollection (as if we’re in a coma or under anesthesia). If everyone around us wasn’t as nurturing as they should be, or downright mean, we wouldn’t have the slightest recollection of it. People we came to trust later in our lives could have been those harshest to us in our early days and nobody but an outside observer would have that knowledge. If that observer didn’t tell, or wasn’t around in later years, did the tree fall in the forest?

I’m not all that versed on repressed memories and related psychology, but it seems to me that patients are always recalling hideous things that happened, rather than just a time where they might’ve lain in their mother’s lap, by a soothing fire, feeling that all was right and snug in the world. Further, if we do have those “snug” moments, are those the ones that carry us through life and give us hope where others, maybe not so cuddled, have doubt? I’ve always thought ‘nature vs. nurture” a fascinating study, although one that would take a spare lifetime, which I do not have.

What most of us remember about this amnesic time after our births and somewhere before the ages of four or five, is what we see in pictures. The ones that carry the unmistakable brand of the decade in which they were taken. Since I’m not yet fifty, my beginnings were captured on thick, quality paper with pattern-cut edges with warm shades of white-grey-black. I try to imagine color in that world, but it’s not there until those same pictures move, as Grampa was also an amateur movie-maker. None of us knows how lucky or unlucky our childhoods were, until notes are compared. Maybe the comparison isn't such a good idea after all.