Looking back at the past with current vision

Do we see it all clearly?

My children often ask me if I remember being their respective ages. They inquisitively want to know if I remember having this or that experience. Well there are days that my mind is so full of the present that I am lucky if I remember why I walked into a room. The kids are starting to approach the ages that I can vaguely remember things about my own childhood.

I find myself at times fixated on the teenage population. We are right on the cusp of entering those years. What comes to mind when I observe teens are questions; “Did act like, dress like, talk like those kids I see around town?” I was far from the perfect child and I certainly provided my father with many gray hairs. Overall, I was an A student. I had group of friends, at times boyfriends, who I hung out with and we did teenage things. I have stumbled across teens that do not say thank you when one of my children holds the door open, they can be loud and intentionally draw attention to their sometimes misplaced behavior. I know I just sounded like my parents.

Dressing the part

In my hazy view, I see myself as a kid that did break rules and curfew. I did wear make-up before my parents deemed it appropriate. The rule growing up was that I could not wear make-up until I was sixteen. At fifteen, not twelve, I would apply thick eyeliner while riding on the bus to school. I would wash my face before my parents got home. This left me looking like I had been crying or rubbing my eyes all day. Today, J. Crew puts out bathing suits for my nine year old that will give lift and shape to her non-existent breasts! On any given day I can spot a young lady that makes grown men turn their heads, only to realize that she is just a tween. This all leaves me confused. I also look at my little girl and think what will the trend be when she reaches teenhood?

Keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road

I grew up in a city so drinking and driving, actually driving at all was not an issue my parents had to deal with. I knew when we decided to live and raise our family in the suburbs that I would face this issue. I did not have the forethought to realize that I would have to worry about other issues that might impair my children’s driving. Things like texting while driving never entered my mind. Now that has to be added to the list of concerns parents have as their teen takes the wheel.

The times they are a changing

When my son was a baby, pagers were in vogue. When I saw a young teen with a pager on his belt, the conclusions I drew about why he could possibly need this device were not good. I naively looked at my Dad and said, “My son will never have a pager!” My wise father chuckled and said; “When this boy is a teen he will wear a wristwatch that is phone and can possibly beam him home.” Well that was a bit farfetched but he does have a phone that can do many things that a small computer can. We got him this phone so we could get in touch when dropping him off at soccer practice. I scratch my head at times and try to remember what we did before cell phones. My kids often joke that when my husband and I were young the dinosaurs still walked the earth. The world I remember was filled with an innocence that I carried into my tween years. I was expected to do laundry and other household chores at a much younger age then my kids. I did not walk up hill both ways to school but I did walk to places. I was not driven up the street to hop on a bus. I learned that sometimes you win and other times you lose. Not everyone was a winner and there were no universal prizes for just playing the game. Each generation faces different challenges. Technology has opened many doors for our youth. The information highway is available for their journey. It has also created intricate bends in the road that can cause them to derail earlier in their development.

The world will continue to evolve and for each generation, parents will try to remember their own youth and pull out the fundamental principles they can apply to raising their kids. We know that most things are not how we remember it and to move forward you can’t look back

My hard drive is out of Memory

I have commented to friends that I believe that I lost part of my ability to remember things when I gave birth to my children. I am sure that there is no medical explanation. It is more about having children giving birth. My oldest child is twelve and right after he was born, I began to notice that I could not remember what I needed to buy at the store or whether I packed everything, I needed in the diaper bag when heading out. Three and half years later when our family grew by two more feet, I realized this problem was getting worse.

Have you ever walked into a room and stood there dumb founded trying to remember why you came into this room in the first place? You think the way to avoid forgetting things is to keep a list but low and behold, you can’t remember where you put the list. Come on, admit it… it has happened to you. Those are some of the early signs that your brain is at times so over-loaded that it has to purge something. When I was young, single and childfree, my memory worked just fine. I even had the ability to forget selective things like what time my curfew was. Now, I can’t even remember those days.

As a child I used to giggle when my grandmother, who had eight children and twenty six grandchildren, would look right at me and scream out several other family member’s names and then finally give up and say, “You girl, come here when I call you!” Now I finally get it. I think my memory is failing with two kids, she had so much more to keep track of. The even funnier thing is that I have managed to look right at one of my children and call them by the other one’s name, I even through my husband in the mix sometimes.

My husband and children’s favorite sign that I am losing it is that I get frantic about whether I have locked the front door, closed the mudroom door and finally the garage door. To my knowledge, though I could be forgetting, I have never left any of those doors unlocked or open. This “obsession” only gets worse when we are leaving on vacation. With that I have a track record of forgetting a diaper bag and realizing I did not have it right before reaching the airport terminal. I read once that to try to remember something you should repeat it to yourself several times. My family flat out falls on the floor laughing when I pull out of the garage and repeat all the way up the driveway closed the door, closed the door.

I know that some memory loss is attributed to aging. I want to believe what I am suffering has more to do with my internal hard-drive having so many things to keep track of that it simply cannot keep up. Maybe one day they will invent brain RAM or I will be able to get some new sort of chip that speeds up my processing. For now, I struggle through and hope that the next time I tell a story I am not repeating it for the millionth time. So remember, wait I forgot what I wanted to tell you.