Feasting on Memories
Diana Reynolds Roome
Parenting, Special Issue, Fall 2000
The day we left the hospital holding my three-day old firstborn, a smiling nurse accompanied our new family trio to the car. She scanned the scrap of baby in the car-seat and said, “Enjoy him; he’ll be off to college before you know it.”
We laughed. She was joking, of course. Other people’s babies turned into college students, but I couldn’t see any evidence that such a thing could ever happen to this eighteen-inch moonface. So we smiled indulgently and went home to embark on our first day as parents.
Well, of course that nurse knew whereof she spoke. Every time we hear that same ex-baby (now over six foot and eighteen years old) bounding out the front door, we’re aware that his last leap over the threshold is drawing closer. Though we have the evidence before us that change is inevitable, we still can’t quite believe that his room will be quiet, tidy and occupied by the ironing board instead of our son. But one thing we have managed to learn. Each stage of childhood seems at to go on for ever when you’re in the thick of it: the broken nights, the diapers, the baseball, the sleepless nights again (this time theirs, not yours). Then suddenly, and apparently without warning, you find yourself looking back on it all.
Last Mother’s Day, with college impending, I decided it was no use just feeling nostalgic. Instead, I decided to make a feast of looking back. This was mainly possible because I had the right ingredients. As we left for a restaurant brunch, I grabbed a battered ring-bound notebook. This was no fancily decorated baby book, with space to enter the first of everything your child accomplishes, tooth, smile, word. I have those too, and treasure them. But those firsts are by definition only the beginning. The moments only get more surprising, funnier and frankly, more miraculous still.
My old notebook was an archive, a veritable compendium, loaded with anecdotes, quotes, observations made while knee-deep in action. Inside were those useful pockets you get in some exercise books, stuffed with scraps of paper, backs of envelopes covered in jottings, and first scribbles made by tiny hands. There were quotes, dialogues, anecdotes and lists of words. They were hilarious, profound, touching and surreal.
In the restaurant we talked and ate our fill of eggs Benedict and waffles. Then I opened the book and started reading. For starters came the baby words, written on pieces of paper that I’d attached to the fridge, now yellow with age and vintage pureed squash. They progressed from the early classics, “Boo boy” for good boy, and “oosh,” an onomatopaeic reversal of the word “shoes” which may also have expressed the way he felt about the speed he gained with leather on his soles. Some pronouncements were garbled but imaginative, such as “skoodadoo” for squirrel. Others hit the mark spot-on, like “tripe-writer.” Considering the amount of tossed paper Ben pulled out of the waste-basket and tried to eat, I’m not surprised he had opinions about the tasteless goods I turned out on that noisy old writing machine that for years I refused to exchange for a computer.
There were quotes that seemed perfect for Mother’s Day, with an honest twist rare nowadays: Mum, I love you, and I hope you will be alive when I’m grown up. Or, One of the things that gives me a personal warming potion is when you kiss me. One of Alex’s comments, at age six, showed insight way beyond his years: I’ve loved you all my life, but you haven’t loved me all your life. When you were five, I was a teensy speck, like a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of an ant. You didn’t even know me then. How could he have known that was essentially true?
A short dramatic dialogue on my fashion sense was reassuring, whichever way I looked at it.
Me: I must comb my hair. It looks like a bird’s nest.
Ben: You’re right, it does. No, it maybe doesn’t. There’s no bird in it.
There were musings on the future while carrying out a close-up inspection of Dad’s chin: When I grow up, I get to have a mustache and splinters in my face. Or more ominously, I’m thinking about it, but I’m not sure I want to get married. At least, I don’t want to marry a woman who whacks cats out the door with a broom. I like cats and I don’t like that sort of woman.
Jokes, inadvertent or not, were scribbled on scraps of paper, old receipts, flyers: Speed bumps can break your suspenders. Easy enough to say when you’re six years old and still learning the parts of the car. Questions were sometimes confidential, like, Mummy, have you ever been in jail?
There were comments on my cooking. Some were complimentary to me, and sometimes God got the credit: Thank you, God, for a wonderful dinner, and I’m glad Mummy made Bisto gravy. Some were not complimentary at all: What’s cooking. Average pie?
Further on in the book, the boys’ own notes were sometimes glued into the pages. One, scribbled on some professional association notepad, reads in second-grade script: Dear mom could you give Alex a big hug and a nice bowl of cearial.(sic) There was even a tiny faded menu in carefully penciled print, that read:
OJ – 2 hugs
Tea – 4 kisses
Tost – 3 hugs
Total: 5 hugs 4 kisses
There were accounts of small kindnesses, as when Alex found a miniature picture of C3PO from Star Wars and taped it to the side of the hamster cage for his pet to look at. If he had posters in his room, why shouldn’t Spika? And there were surreal moments, as when when Ben (sitting on his upper bunk) said: I saw with my ear when you smiled, and it made a great blast of energy that traveled up the bedpost and all the way over here. Or Alex (then age 4, looking at a poster of James Dean) said, Look, mummy, that’s me when I was a daddy.
Some were too soppy or poignant to read at brunch. These were my private collection of memories, like the early morning a week after his brother was born, when Ben appeared at my bedside, his eyes glowing with a great question above the edge of the mattress and asked, Mummy who is Alex’s mother? He knew, of course, but needed to keep checking out once again this stupendous new reality.
One of my favorite photos of them was taken within a few days of that anxious inquiry, and they look the picture of brotherly devotion. I am so glad we caught on camera (and sometimes video) their fleeting baby smiles, moments of toddler mischief, mud baths, and the birthday cake frosting all over their faces. But pen and paper have a power all their own. They capture a child’s words and deeds like the exotic one-day butterflies they are. They help chart the marvelous course of their language development, their insight, their free imaginations and their amazing sense of what’s important. Comments that once brought tears of laughter or poignancy to my eyes would have evaporated if I hadn’t captured and pinned them down while they were still hovering in the air.
I still note down things they say occasionally, and keep cartoons or lines of poetry that I find discarded in their rooms. To them, it’s litter. But to me it’s treasure trove. Now they talk about their philosophy classes or golf swings. They surprise us by inviting sixteen of their best friends over for an instant barbecue, or driving our car into the ditch. This too will pass. But when I open my notebook, I can be sure the past wasn’t an illusion.