Memories

The brain is an amazing organ. The way that it processes and stores information is fascinating. When I think of the brain I find myself thinking of it as a CPU within my body however, I think my brain could benefit from some refurbishment. As I have got older my ROM drive appears to be malfunctioning and the RAM is slowing down as well.

Yesterday the boy asked what had happened to a particular toy that he had been given. Now this toy was never played with, it had been taken out of the box once, set up and played for about ten minutes, packed away and forgotten about in a cupboard for a few years. As a consequence of believing the boy had forgotten about it, on my last annual purge of children’s toys I have given it away to a charity shop. Typically the boy now wants to know where it is and I am not brave enough to tell him.

Now this was a strange moment of pride for me. My son seems to be inheriting my seemingly infallible memory rather than my husband’s memory, which seems to resemble a colander, or so he would have me believe. I doubt this claim as my husband remarked that we should have known he would remember it given the debacle we had experienced with the horse…

Apologies, this is a long story but please bear with me.

So when the boy was a toddler and the girl was a baby we went for a family day out to…wait for it…Trago Mills! If you live in the South West you will know exactly where I am talking about. If you do not it is a big shopping centre with a miniature train ride, model railways, slides and various other amusements.

Anyway the kids had been good in the shop while we were looking at boring grown up stuff like car mats, decorating supplies, homewares etc so we took them both to the toy department of the store with the intention that they could choose something that they would like as a treat.

So we are looking around the girl chose a teddy or something. The boy sees a playset with a toy horse, horse box and Land Rover which he says he wants. Fine, no problem, you can have the horse if that is what you would like. We start to head towards the tills (check out) and the boy spots a tractor that he wants to buy as well. So we give him the choice and say he can have one or the other and he chose the tractor, we pay we leave.

In the car home we are all very happy, the children fall asleep for the majority of the journey, we timed our day perfectly so as to not mess up the routine drastically (cos that is how I roll now). It gets to bedtime and the boy suddenly turns to us and asks where his horse is…we had no idea what he was talking about. This escalated in to ten minutes of bewildered questioning to ascertain he was talking about the toy from the shop, which was promptly followed by a further thirty minutes trying to abate the resulting tantrum because we had not bought both toys.

On the plus side at least we were in the privacy of our own home rather than the in the middle of shopping centre because it was an epic exhibition that the two nearly three year old rage, anger, disappointment and betrayal portrayed. He calmed down and was eventually lulled to sleep by the sweet melodies of Ferocious Dog.

I wonder if he will remember that? There are certain incidents that I do not believe they will remember because they were too young, such as first Christmases and birthdays, but I wonder when that stops being the case. Will he remember that he could not have the horse. Will they remember that they had toys that just randomly disappeared because they were not used?

And that leads me to my own memory. People who know me seem to think I have an amazing memory. To a certain degree they are correct. I can remember birthdays and significant dates easily. The knowledge that I have acquired during my working life is certainly adequate to enable me to hold my own in a legal setting and I remember every person that I have had any encounter with in both my professional and personal life.

But I have a confession. I cannot recall anything from my life prior to being 5 or 6 years old. Is that normal? In fact some events I am not sure whether I can actually remember them or whether I just remember that I have seen a photograph and was told when it was taken.

As I am sitting here thinking about my memories I think I can safely say that my earliest memory is of playing alone at my desk in my bedroom in a flat that I lived in with my Mum. I had an old pink telephone handset on my desk that I would pretend to use while I was writing stories and drawing pictures.

It is quite sad in a way but it is also a benefit in other ways. For example, it means that I have no memory of a time when my Father was a permanent fixture in our family home. My memories with my Dad are fortnightly weekend visits where we would go to theme parks or soft plays and I would run around like a loon. That never seemed abnormal to me.

I know that my Mum, step father and myself would go away on holiday every year with some close family friends every year. I know that we went to a variety of places around the country but I cannot remember where we went. Occasionally I will find myself in a place looking around with a weird sense of Deja vu. It creeps me out but then later discover I went there as a child.

How does your mind decide what memories to keep and which to bury? More often than not for a lot of people they are overwhelmed by the amount of negative memories and struggle to remember the “good times”. Why is that? Why doesn’t the brain bury the bad ones.

I have said before that I believe all experiences have a purpose whether they are good or bad. They all play a part in shaping you as an individual. But if you have had particularly negative or difficult experiences during your life it can be very hard not to allow yourself to become stuck in those moments.

I have days were I just feel odd. I do not know why and I cannot describe the feeling with any other word than odd. Its like your stuck in pause while the world is continuing around. I have described it in the past as feeling like your wading through treacle and no matter how hard you try you seem to make very little progress with moving forward. it is just odd.

There are certain times of the year where I think I am subconsciously a little more sensitive than usual. I know why those times of the year are hard but I choose not to dwell on the negative dates. I try and focus on the here and now as much as possible.

My memory doesn’t concern me until I forget a date for the children like a non uniform day, dress up day for school or a deadline for an activity that they wanted to take part in. Then it concerns me but only because my memory, or lack thereof as the case may be, has had an adverse effect on some one else.

Anyway so today has been an odd day. we are in lockdown again, my husband is due to return to work this week and he will be lodging away until the end of the week. In normal circumstances this wouldn’t bother me much but for some reason it is niggling in my brain tonight.

I think it is because we are in lockdown here in the UK and I am not sure where our family fits in terms of the regulations. While my husband is away do I count as a single parent which means I can have a support bubble or do I just put my big girl pants on and deal with it for the time that he is away.

Now I love my family, our set up works for us, being a “railway widow” does have its perks but that is a subject for another time.