Rogue Memory

Remember that first Birds & Bees talk? The messy and vaguely embarrassing details about how babies are made, and the realization that adults you know–your mom, your dad, anybody with kids–had done those things at least once… It’s all a little shocking, a little fascinating, a little disconcerting. In short, it’s a big deal. It’s one of those milestones you carry with you.

My story is pretty uneventful. Mom gave the usual “when a man and woman love each other very much…” routine, with some G-rated visual aids and lots of dry, boring egg and sperm stuff. Not very unusual, except for one thing: it didn’t happen.

On my last visit home, I recounted my memory of this event. It was pretty vivid: I remembered the book, the floral-print arm chair, the room in my grandmother’s house, how I was sitting… all of which made it that much more disorienting when my mother told me it had never happened. I defer to her memory on this one–after all, I was rather young. But this isn’t the only time that a particularly vivid or cherished or noteworthy memory has been deemed false by someone who ought to share it. But without hard evidence, who’s to say which of us is right?

Memory’s a slippery, slippery thing. It’s not to be trusted, but it’s also frequently all we’ve got.

That conversation made me doubt afresh every memory I think I have about my childhood and adolescence, and there’s a certain bereavement that comes with that. I’ve lost something that may or may not have ever existed, and I’ve nothing for replacement.

But does it really matter if my memory is true or not? Our species has long put great stock in myth, and told it like it was truth. Fact becomes fiction becomes fact of a different sort, and is no less valuable for it.

Mine is a problem of simple semantics: All this time, I’ve said memory and meant historical truth, meant the facts of what came before. Fact has a place at the table, but the guest list is larger still. Memories exist in a kind of no man’s land between fact and fiction, and can’t be made to fit the rules of either. Barbara Kingsolver wrote, “Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”

My memories are a map of where I came from, but one that could never get you back to any place I’ve been. You’d be better served by a trail of breadcrumbs–more reliable, and you’d have a snack.

Perhaps this is why we love a good scar–it’s proof, a lasting imprint from our collision with some part of the world. We had substance. We were here. Beats Kilroy doodles.

Memories are of events that have helped shape the person you are, and the memory itself–the distillation of the event, the facts or feelings that stand out from it–continues that work as long as it sticks in your head. So when these movers and shapers can no longer be trusted, what’s a gal to do? Jettison the false-in-facts but true-in-feel in favor of a dry, rote account of what “really” happened? Wax philosophical about how reality is a fluid concept and not subject to the laws of small-minded beings? Wish you’d taken more pictures? Or maybe you just go with it: at the next family gathering, we’ll each have our stories to tell. Maybe some of the ragged edges will match up. Maybe we’ll find a new mythology in the spaces between.