Memories of Me

Decades ago now I read Timothy Findley say in an interview, “We are our memories.”

Well, I can tell you, I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now, but that didn’t stop it from getting stuck in my head.

Memories of me: embarrassed, humiliated, ashamed, mad, sad, wanting to lie down in parking lots and cry, guilty guilty guilty.

There’s a reason I’ve quit drinking five times and counting, Timothy Findley, damn you to Heaven (where hopefully there’s an editor because Geez Louise dude “Not Wanted on the Voyage” was not wanted 100 pages before it ended).

Okay so why do we remember what we do? Is it because of who we are? Or is who we are because of what we remember? And can I reinvent myself as a well-adjusted adult by putting my childhood memories out into the galaxy so they aren’t mine anymore, they’re everybody’s?

Well here goes nothing. Or everything. Because I’m tired of being messed up me. You be messed up me for a change, the idiot who asked her sister-in-law thirty years ago, “Oh wow, how far along are you?” when it turned out she wasn’t pregnant, just dipping a bowl into her homemade granola one too many times.

I guess?

Ugh. What was I thinking? That bump was so low the baby would’ve been ready to pop out over the Christmas pudding if she’d been pregnant.

But that’s not the sort of memory I mean, not that I wouldn’t want to go back in time and say instead, oh, maybe something like “Gosh, you look like you’re enjoying your homemade granola”. No, I’m talking about those memories that set the stage for “Oh wow, how far along are you?” when the bump isn’t even in the right place to be a pregnancy in progress as opposed to an imminent birth.

Now, I don’t know why the memory I really want to get out of my head and into yours bugs me so much but it does. Probably because it’s got a Charlie Brown-ish vibe to it that’s stuck to me like that weird smell in the bedroom I stay in, or used to, at my brother’s house.

“Did somebody die in there, do you think, like before you bought the place, I mean?” Except the look he gave my sister-in-law made me wonder if somebody’d died in there AFTER they bought the place.

Naturally, I just let it drop.

So, this memory, it bugs me on its own but it also bugs me because every time I mull it over – which I do every freakin’ day – it reminds me of how on-my-own I was at such a young age. Too young. People, stupid people, stupid people without a clue about how it was, how it is, complain about helicopter parenting.

Well shut the front door because helicopter parenting by any other name is just parenting.

C’mon, who’s kidding who, here. The Greatest Generation may’ve been good at killing Nazis (although they didn’t exactly finish the job, did they) but they sure weren’t the greatest generation of parents. Know anybody over 90 who had therapy? Cripes, first they’re raised by a bunch of PTSD cases from WWI – during a Depression – then they’re in WWII – and nobody thought maybe they could use a little therapy?

Cripes, parenting wasn’t even a word until Boomers had kids.

Sidebar memory: I’m living in Belleville, three kids under the age of four, my husband’s working in Ottawa. I’ve just discovered, thanks to one of those “lice proud” letters from the school, we’ve all got lice, which explains all the scratching and the little black hopping dots I’d noticed on my middle one’s head about a month prior when I was helping her hang a Barbie from a lampshade. It’s winter, too, and I need to get to a banking machine because the drugstore is only taking cash, which I didn’t have on hand – thanks to technology – and I need to buy lice shampoo.

No. Stop. Just stop with your mayonnaise nonsense. There’s nothing natural about mayonnaise, either. Chemicals. I needed chemicals. Harsh, nature killing chemicals. The harshest and killiest.

Anyway, I get all three toddlers suited up, strapped into their car seats, and off we head to the plaza where there’s a banking machine accessible from the parking lot.

Oh, I should probably mention, while I was getting them ready, my four-year-old stood staring at me like I had lice crawling all over my face and not just my head.

“What, M.? What’s wrong? C’mon, we’ve got to get a move on, here. Kill the lice before it kills us.”

A tear rolls down her cheek. “You’re going to die and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

And I don’t know what happened between existentialist little me growing up in Sault Ste. Marie, my father dying when I was exactly her age, and almost immediately realizing my mother would be next, then my older sister, then my older brother, and then me, forever and ever, and yes, there was nothing I could do about it – and mid-thirties mom me, a single-minded lice killing machine.

(By the way, I didn’t factor my younger sister into this sequential death scenario because she came after me, but thinking about it now I can sure understand why my mother turned a page so fast when my father died I sometimes wondered if he’d ever been alive. Imagine, four kids under the age of ten, one of them still a baby in a crib everybody kept forgetting about.)

Alas, I have to admit, instead of indulging M. with the consideration she deserved, I channelled a young Woody Allen’s mom in Radio Days, when he’s a little boy experiencing an existential crisis (“because the universe is expanding”) and she demands, “What business is that of yours?!” It gave me great comfort that scene, and so instead of giving M. due consideration, I brushed her off with, “Well I’m not going to die with lice crawling around my head so get your snowsuit on so I can get the cash to buy the shampoo to blast those little bastards to smithereens.”

(And yes, of course, M. immediately moved on to care about the lice we were about to kill, explaining like I was out-of-control and not the lice that had been nesting in our hair for at least a month, “Madame C. says lice like clean healthy hair so why do we have to kill them?” To which I non-sequitored, “Well Madame C. takes so many sick days you may as well have a permanent supply teacher so enough from Madame C.)

Oh and did I mention it’s -25 Celsius, a record-breaking cold that would last a week?

Anyway, we get to the plaza and I park directly in front of the banking machine, which is behind a large plate glass window. All I need to do is get out of the car, open the door, slip my card in the machine and <voila> cash. Done. Off to the drugstore to buy the shampoo.

But when I step out of the car I see another woman standing by hers, looking over at mine, where she can see three toddlers strapped into their car seats in the back. And I remember a fatigue coming over me and wanting to just give up and lie down in the parking lot and cry. Maybe let another car run over my head.

And that’s partly because I also, in the middle of all this, was remembering how my mother used to leave me and my little sister in the liquor store parking lot – all the time – when she’d go to replenish her supply. And one time a scary looking old man, he looked like a sad-faced clown, the one in my nightmares, came to the car and tried to get in. I locked all the doors before he could open any one of them but he kept tapping at the windows and trying the door handles, grinning at us, telling me to let him in. And I yelled at him that my mom was coming any minute now and he laughed and said, “Oh no she isn’t, girlie, better let me in, I”ll take care of you.”

Then, after what seemed like forever, he stumbled off, and when my mom showed up I started to cry (after keeping my face as stern as possible for what seemed like an eternity) and told her what happened. And it was just like with Mr. M. who drove around when we were on our way to school with his penis hanging out of his pants trying to lure us into the car, and she said, “Well I would assume you’d have the sense to not let him in the car. What’s wrong with you? Or are you just making all this up? I never know what to believe anymore. You told Miss R. you take your head off at night before you go to sleep so you won’t have bad dreams. Honestly, I wish you’d stop with this nonsense. She’s enough of a nut as it is, she doesn’t need you giving her ideas.”

But instead of lying down in the parking lot and crying, or worse, leaving the kids in the car while I walked the two inches to the banking machine from which I could see them and they could see me for the entirety of the two minute transaction – and risk this woman calling Children’s Aid and having my three toddlers taken away from me AND my husband winning the “Better Parent” contest we were in even though he was parenting while living in a different city – I unbuckled the kids and took them in with me while I used the banking machine. When I came out, the woman was gone.

Oh my living Gord just remembering that I want to lie down in a parking lot and cry for young mother me all over again now.

Why do we make each other’s lives so much harder than they have to be? Why couldn’t that woman have come over to my car and said, “Hey, you go in and use the banking machine. I’ll stand here by your car with the kids in case some Gladys Kravitz comes along to report you to Children’s Aid for child abandonment. Back in my day we didn’t even bother with seatbelts, never mind car seats.”

I would do that for a young mother. I would. Honest. Although they’d probably call the cops and I’d end up on a Weird Parking Lot Lady Registry or some such.

No, we are the best parents. Or were. Now that our Millennials are out of our basements and adulting (their word, thank you very much – not) they’re the best parents.

It’s no one’s fault, but it’s everyone’s responsibility. Because therapy, that’s why, so I guess I should stop blaming The Greatest Generation for not knowing such a thing as therapy even existed.

Anyway, to the Charlie Brown-ish memory.

It’s circa 1964 or maybe it’s ’65. It was winter, for sure, because I remember being in that hand-me-down from a sibling or cousin snowsuit I could barely walk the several big blocks to school in, and Mr. M. wasn’t out driving around with his penis hanging out of his pants trying to lure little girls on our lonesome into his car.

Too cold. Fall and spring were his perverting seasons.

So I’m standing at the side of the school where us kindergarteners go in, our own entrance safe from the grade ones to fours, finally early enough to be at the front of the line. So early in fact there’s still no one behind me even though I’ve been standing there a while, long enough for the sweat inside my snowsuit to be freezing. It’s afternoon kindergarten, and like I said, winter, and after the first couple of days long ago when Dolly walked me the several blocks to school, I’ve been doing the walk on my own.

It was a lot, too much, and that walk took a half hour. And after kindergarten I did it back and forth for lunch, because nobody ate lunch at school in those days. Not at our school, anyway. And we had to dodge the Catholic school kids, too, because whatever living hell they were experiencing they wanted to visit upon us.

At first I feel triumphant, really chuffed, but as time goes on and no other kids show up, anywhere, although I didn’t want to check the bigger kids’ entrance in case I lost my place in line, I start getting that sinking feeling, like maybe I’ve got it wrong, when I notice some movement between the cracks in the curtains from inside the classroom.

Everybody’s already inside. I’m not first in line. In fact I’m so late now, thanks to standing outside like a chump for probably half an hour, I’m going to be in super big trouble.

And I was, I know I was, but I don’t remember what happened next. I can guess the teacher was mad (she hit my hand with a ruler once just for holding hands with another little girl when we were supposed to be lined up single file) and the school would’ve called Gram when I wasn’t there for attendance, and Gram would’ve called my mother, who was a high school librarian, and my mother would’ve been mad to be disturbed at work.

Oh boy did she ever get mad being disturbed at work. That was the big no no. Disturbing my mother at work. Break your ankle during a gymnastics display in grade six? Holy Rummoli. You’d think I’d done it on purpose.

“What the hell were you thinking? You can’t do gymnastics! And you know better than to disturb me at work!” Over and over and over, all the way to the hospital and right up to the moment the doctor said, “Looks like your daughter’s going to need a cast on that fractured ankle.”

I hadn’t cried the whole time, until then, not that it made much difference to my mother. And you probably won’t believe this but I didn’t get a ride to school once. Not once. In fact, one day, while I was slowly making my way home, she barrelled right by me in the car. I waved one of my crutches around to get her attention but she still didn’t stop.

Man, you had to make your bed pretty damn good back in the day because for sure you were the one who’d have to lie in it. Got a problem? Well who told you life was going to be a bowl of cherries/bed of roses/picnic in the park? Break a leg? Why the hell were you doing gymnastics?

And yet, if I had been first in line, after months of being last, would I have insisted on living in a house across the street from the school my kids would go to so I could look out the window and see them in the yard at recess and they could come home for lunch and I’d have the storybook memories of their childhood I wanted for my own?

<pause for bask in warm glow of memory>

By middle-school, of course, my ex and I had both long since lost the Better Parent contest we were in, and I decided not to wait until death do us part, and moved out (and down) to the apartment, the apartment with a crack dealer below us on the first floor and a raving lunatic above us on the third. The kids would come and camp out every weekend, three to a bedroom, me on the fold out couch in the living room trying to pretend nothing had changed, not really, when, of course, everything had.

But enough, right? Memories are just stories we tell ourselves, aren’t they, they’re not me, they’re not you. Timothy Findley was right about a lot of things but he wasn’t right about that. Memories are just made up nonsense for the most part, like the made up nonsense I told Miss R. back in grade two, when I was teacher’s pet.

Oh Good Gord! I’d forgotten all about that – I was teacher’s pet in grade two! I must’ve shook off that Charlie Brown-ish memory of waiting in line thinking I was first when everybody else had long since gone into the classroom 57 years ago!

Wow, well isn’t that just the icing on the cake? I put that Charlie Brown-ish memory out into the galaxy and <poof> there’s a better one I’d completely forgotten about. And now I’ve put it out in the galaxy, too, because I don’t want to be Miss R.’s pet anymore. My mother was right. Miss R.  was crazier’n a bag of hammers. And being teacher’s pet is the double-est of swords. Nope, out they all go, out into the galaxy. The past is gone, memories just stories we tell ourselves and each other, everybody in them a made up character.

I am myself. Right now. In this moment. That’s who I am. And who I want to be.