Cross Generation Relationships Expand Childhood
Posted by: Soapy Dishwater
Subject tags: relationship, psychology, personal, life, child rearing
on Dec 30, 2008
Original Comment Thread for HumanValue of Wild Spaces
Reiserer: I find that writing about special experiences provides a foundation for remembering them in more detail. When you have kids that grow into a new stage of life almost monthly, writing short chronicles about activities and feelings sets benchmarks for later exploration of important memories.
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Hmmm....I don't know about "benchmarks" but I can think of a few "special experiences" that I'd rather not remember in great detail. Fortunately time smooths the rough edges.
I'd also say that experiencing life as a parent has definitely given me the chance to expand my interpretation of my own childhood. One of the hardest things about my mother and grandmothers dying is that I've lost the chance to understand experiences from their perspectives. My mother and I were finally on a path of sharing and expanding on our memories when she passed on.
I don't typically say I've lost my mother because I see her everywhere - but that's a topic unto its own. What I've lost is the opportunity to understand myself better because my memories would have had more richness. She would talk about how I went through different stages and how she tried to deal with them, sometimes she could refer back to her own childhood and occasionally she could refer back to conversations with her mother about the same issues. It was wonderfully insightful and organic and like we really do live within alternate realities and parallel universes. There's always more going on than meets the eye - especially because as children we only have limited experiences to connect new memories. Now that I'm the oldest in the matriarch, I can approximate general trends but nothing compares to being able to talk about specifics.
I can also recall discussions with my both of my grandmothers that have helped me make decisions along the way. My recollections of my grandfathers have more to do with overall life perspectives than specific recollections but they were both gone before I was 10.
I've drifted somewhat from the initial essay but I'm responding that every "foundation for remembering" has a basement that cannot be neglected.
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written by Soapy Dishwater, December 30, 2008
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written by rsr, December 30, 2008
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I think that your point was well made that memories are points of perspective and that they often get reinterpreted when new knowledge enlightens them. I wrote another essay that poignantly addresses this very topic: Faded Memories of Knowing Everything.
The metaphors we use to describe our thoughts are just as informative as the words and sentence structures we use to represent them. In my case, a benchmark is a small brass plate, set in a cement foundation and inscribed with some identifying information, that helps us survey the landscape--in this case the landscape of our own past. A basement, however, is a dark underground space beneath a dwelling, often used as a storeroom for keepsakes and useful things, and frequently identified as a safe refuge from a storm.
There are quite a number of my own memories for which a basement would serve as a better metaphor, but for the recollections in my article, The Human Value of Wild Places, I must stand by the benchmark metaphor because, as a small, elevated survey point exposed to the bright sky, it bears the connotations that more readily communicate my meaning.