Remember or Forget?

When I was pregnant with my first child, I wish someone would have told me the honest truth about parenting. Truly I wish they would have kept all the stuff about pacifiers, breastfeeding, crying it out, sleep training, and natural remedies to themselves and just given me the simple truth. Someone should have said to us, "Parenting will be full of embarrassing moments. You will be more embarrassed than you've ever been......time and time again. You will never do anything harder or more important. Just remember to love and forgive, yourselves and them.....OFTEN."

Okay, I have active little boys and maybe that makes us more prone to embarrassing moments. However, I have some honest friends who have shared some of their embarrassing parenting moments and so I'm pretty sure it's not just me. But why doesn't anyone tell you that along with being sleep deprived you will also be subject to some very humiliating moments?  My theory is simply this.....we forget. I think part of parenting must be like childbirth. There are parts of it that you just simply forget because they are too painful to remember; like the terrible 2s that can last until their 4, or the sleepless nights when they are newborns, or the stomach flus that last for weeks because they just spread from one family member to another. In the moment that it's happening it's the worst thing ever but when it's over it can quickly dull to a distant memory.....like childbirth. You remember it hurt like hell, at some point it felt like the pain would never end, but then that sweet baby was handed over to you and THAT is the moment that remains engrained in your memory.

I want to remember.

And by remember I don't mean being able to recall the big milestones such as; when they got their first tooth, when they started walking, or what age did they start calling me mom instead of mommy (yes that is a big milestone to me). But instead, I want to have an accurate recollection of what it was to be their mother. Some days I think it's the best job God ever gave me and others I'm not quite sure he chose the right person. At times, I am congratulating myself for a job well done and then there's those moments where I feel a complete and sudden urge to immediately enroll in a parenting class because of my motherly inadequacies. I want to remember all of that.....I think.

A friend and I have a joke that when people our age were kids that kids must have been so much easier. Babies seemed to sleep through the night, children didn't talk back, no one had any sleeping issues, we rarely hear of temper tantrums, picky eaters were just not allowed, and how many times do you hear older moms say, " Oh, so and so never did that. " I know we live in different times but kids are still kids. They are going to push their limits, get crabby, and so forth.  I NEVER want to be that person who says to a younger mom, " Wow, you must really have your hands full." Instead, I always want to be that person who remembers what it FELT like to have my hands full.

But just how much do I want to remember? Are some things better off forgotten? I mean this is one of the main reasons why I blog, so that I can remember motherhood.....in all of it's gloriness and goriness. But are there memories, like the pain in childbirth, that should remain a forgotten memory? And if so, which memories do we treasure and which do we conveniently allow to escape into the black abyss of forgetfulness? And is it a conscious choice? I don't think so......but maybe it should be.

Something happened a few months ago that has triggered this kind of game in my head. Remember or Forget? And it kind of makes me laugh. It makes me laugh because at the time, what happened seemed so horrible that I thought I'd never forget it but then a few days later I had forgotten it already. I have all these memories that have flooded my head, most of them embarrassing and I have been thinking do I want to remember that or let it become blurry where it won't seem as bad as it really was. And as I go through the list, most memories I choose to remember. Well, that's mostly true. The moments that you can look back on and laugh about are easy to remember.  But it is the moments that were not funny, moments that were sad or where there was forgiveness needed either by the parent or the child that are not so fun to remember. Or scary moments when children were hurt or sick, those aren't all that fun to remember either. But I'm working up on drudging them all up because like I said, I want to remember this season of my life in all it's authenticity.




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