For one week this summer, S and J attended an exclusive sleepaway camp called Camp Grandma—the only camp the kids attended that managed to have food, emotional support, routine application of sunscreen, and a sense of order all at the same time. My MIL stacked the activities high to keep them busy, and one of the tasks she set was for them to start their own scrapbooks, providing them with puffy stickers of kangaroos and baseballs and photos of their childhood—750 pictures from my camera roll uploaded to Shutterfly, printed, and dispatched to her house. It was a brilliant gambit since a) kids love to glue, they love the power of using the sharp scissors, and b) she was offloading the labor and scope of memory-keeping to them.
When Noodles and I arrived at the end of the week and leafed through the scrapbooks, though, I found that they had assembled a false history. On page 2 of J’s book, three out of five baby photos pridefully trimmed and glued down to the thick pages were actually photos of baby S.
VOICE OF JOAN DIDION: We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
The photo on J’s title page was one of S snuggling into me as a toddler, her face hidden in the folds of my dress, which draped over what was then a belly pregnant with J. In fairness, the babies I stamp out do seem to come from the same ginger-haired mold. Even I have to squint at unfamiliar newborn photos.
But the care! The crooked placement of photos of “me” that are actually of a different baby. I felt like a benevolent god watching my child troubling over the first ideas of self, the kindling smoking but not catching.
Comprehending the world before they existed is a frequent stumbling block for both S and J, but maybe a little easier for S, since our family history kind of begins with her birth. My iPhone camera roll goes back to the moment after she came out.
J arrived 18 months later, but is always insisting that he was there for any events prior to his birth, watching, he says, with a telescope out of my belly. If S was there, he thinks he was there too. “Remember when we were both in the belly and I was shaking your egg trying to get you to hatch?” I heard him tell S in the car one day, getting multiple important details wrong.
History, for him, is a continuum of him waiting to be born (in a hardshell egg), then collecting Lego sets.
Memory-keeping is an act of care, and I take it as a reflection on the person doing the curating more so than the person they’re memorializing. The bad department store photoshoots with front teeth missing, the bursts of near-identical newborn photos, the movement in a Loop or Boomerang—eventually these will degrade into the realm of the shitpic or fall into the void, never to be seen again. So the act of trying to corral mementos is really the thing. Celebrities and rich people pay people big money to create personal archives (the new having your family portrait painted by a pastoralist), but frazzled parents have to act as their own historians and librarians in and around microwaving the dino nuggets and doing the twelve-step tuck-ins. Even worse, when you become a parent, you don’t know which Etsy trend you’re going to hew to for the next decade, so inevitably end up with a mix of approaches.
In 2015, when I had S, people were doing the letter board thing with their babies, and also the badge thing (1 month! 2 months! 3 months!), which has since evolved into the pizza slice thing. I attempted to do a video montage of one second from every day of her first year, which was another popular pastime, but it wound up being short clips from maybe 50 days, a video set to Father John Misty that I subsequently lost when migrating phones and computers into the cloud (thematically speaking, right on). J’s montage a year and a half later was more like medium-length clips from 12 days. More and more moments were falling off the conveyor belt before I could catch them. Maybe it has to be that way.
I keep seeing variations on a meme where the person is like “how can this person who was born in 2000 be 23 when I was born in 1987 and am also 23?” That’s it, isn’t it. You look at your baby book and even you don’t know how you grew out of that grinning turnip.
This weekend, we camped, and I gave my phone to J and his friend to take photos so they could create a history all of their own:
AH, MEMZ.
Postscript:
Margaret Atwood on old age and time:
Had they really been that careless, that oblivious? They had. Obliviousness had served them well. (Old Babes in the Woods)
Also Lisa Marchiano:
“To be a mother, then, is to live with a burning awareness of the passage of time. Some women find themselves overcome with a desire for another baby in part as a way to put off the inevitable reckoning with chronos.” —from Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself (which was a bit too Jungian for my tastes (Marchiano is a Jungian analyst) but had some good ideas and nailed it with the above grab)
Related: How George Washington Taught Me To Love Awkward Family Photos
Canada
Noodles and I visited the Supreme Court while in Ottowa this summer because it was unclear what else we should be doing there. When S saw a photo in my camera roll back in New York, she asked, “Is that the Rockettes?”
To my Canadian friends: I understand the personal dilemma of identifying with a country founded on a flippant and twee brand of colonialism, I really do.
*Cirque Alfonse were brilliant and hysterical in Montreal. Big recommend.
Obligatory Barbie meme
Very big month for existential crises in the popular media
Other goodies
I had a wild response to this piece in Literary Hub on the hubris of being an adult vis a vis children’s lit. If you subscribed to Kafka’s after reading that, 1) thank you! 2) you might enjoy this Dirt piece on bootleg nursery murals of Disney IP.
AND
fiction in Dirt!Yas Anne Enright on taking a stroll:
It was hard to write prose during the pandemic, impossible to consider a readership, a destination, and besides, prose was too social a form for this antisocial time.
I was very into this
essay by Claire-Louise Bennett:“Risotto tastes lovely and has a comforting texture and all the rest, but the real point of making it is that it takes ages for the stubborn little arborio grains to succumb to the broth. Consequently, in the meantime, you can fill your boots with booze, smoke your head off, and embroil yourself in deeply emotional conversation, and it doesn’t matter a jot – the meal won’t spoil, or burn, or toughen or anything like that; in fact, it’ll just keep getting scrummier and creamier.”
We saw the amazing Allison Russell in Ottowa, as well as Billianne and Julia Jacklin; Jacklin is an Aussie musician with a stellar voice who recorded an incredible cover of Rowland S. Howard’s “Shivers” (previously covered by the Screaming Jets, for the Oz contingent). Enjoyyyy.
LoLing through this piece. Where to begin. Yes, the Rockettes-- my husband and I Call the American august judiciary The Supremes. But you really reeled me in with the click through to your earlier piece on family portraits.(the new having your family portrait painted by a pastoralist or how George Washington Taught Me to Love Awkward Family Photos). I loved it so much I will have to write about what you wrote.
The Rockettes!!!!
Also: J’s camp photo. Chefs kiss 🏆