Why I do what I do

Recently, Mallory has become a really chatty little thing, and I am always trying to listen closely to catch that a-ha! moment when she first really and truly speaks. With Liam, he babbled for months, sounds that we thought might be something but then again, maybe not; by the time we realized he was actually speaking, we had sort of missed the momentous date. But I can’t remember when that was. Was he nine months old when we realized he was talking? 12 months? 15? What was the first word we recognized from him? It couldn’t have been more than a couple of years ago that it happened, and it ranked right up there on the chart of babyhood milestones, and yet I’m drawing a complete blank.

I have a terrible memory, most of the time. That’s quite a claim to make when I got straight A’s in school (until university, anyway :P) and can remember the most inane trivia imaginable, a feat that, for years, got me invited back to join my old work colleagues in the annual trivia challenge – even after I had left their group – even when I was on maternity leave. (I was not asked back this year, and I’d like to point out that this was the first time in 4 years that they did not place in the top 3).
The problem is that I don’t remember the details of my own life. I chat with an old friend from high school all the time and she is constantly talking of the things we used to do and the fun we used to have. When she mentions these parties and road trips, they sound vaguely familiar to me, but they are definitely not details I can recall on my own. Likewise, Chad remembers every date we ever had, the names of all the people we’ve met and meals we’ve eaten on our travels, the exact timeline and process of buying and fixing up our first house together. To me, it’s all a blur. A happy blur, but a blur nonetheless.

I have a grandmother who is alive and kicking in her mid-90s, but she suffers from Alzheimer’s, and I often wonder if I will face a similar fate. Maybe all the warning signs are already there.
Now that we have these precious, precious kids, it saddens me even more that I am so awful at remembering stuff. I never want to forget how it felt to hold them when they were tiny babies or how their eyes lit up when they saw something for the first time. I want to remember the adorable things they say and how they make me so proud.

And so, I document it. I write about it and photograph it. I try to commit it to memory by reliving it while recording it; and if that fails, then I will always have these volumes of stories and pictures to look back on. How I hope that the emotions all come flooding back every time I revisit these moments as they do now while they are being created; that the day will never come that I am reading it for seemingly the first time.

How I hope.