Memories

Do you ever wonder what things your children will look back on as adults and select as their best memories of growing up? I do. Like Jesus says in the book of Matthew, we parents go out of our way to give our children good gifts. Not just physical things, like a custom-designed, homemade Titanic birthday cake— complete with iceberg— on a certain child’s birthday (been there, done that), or stuff under the tree on Christmas morning. No. We give our children the best of gifts: the gift of days ripe with joy and free of fear and pulsing with opportunity. We give our children the gift of childhood.

I have some truly wonderful memories of growing up. I was a young child in the waning days 70s and opening peals of the 80s. I remember wearing sunsuits in the summer, and moon boots in the winter. I had a favorite doll (Little Heather), a favorite tv show (Woody Woodpecker), and a best friend (Moni). I rode my Big Wheel on a safe, suburban street, and yes, I used the Spin Out Lever and yee-hawed like Bo Duke. I spent long afternoons swinging, making mud pies, pulling cucumbers from our garden, rinsing them with water from the hose, and eating them while sitting under our picnic table. In the winter, I built snow forts and pretended that I was Han Solo in search of a frozen Luke Skywalker on the planet Hoth, or stayed over for dinner at Moni’s house and watched Joker’s Wild while eating on tv trays, which was both exotic and thrilling. On Sunday mornings, my grandfather came to our house and picked me up for church, letting me ride shotgun (and unbelted) in his truck, just the two of us.

It was a good life.

As the mother, I look at my children and wonder what will stand out to them. Which days will have been their best days? Which places will be set apart? Which moments will define their seasons?

I saw a meme recently that suggested, “Kids Don’t Remember Their Best Day of Television.” Another posited the same about gaming. And you know, I don’t think that’s true in the way that originator of the memes would like us to think. Sure, it’s popular to rail against families where Minecraft is the common language, or where life seems to revolve around characters from a series of shows. In my house, we don’t play video games, and our viewing is limited to the few selections that have made their way into our collection. But I still remember being enthralled by Princess Diana’s wedding dress as it floated on the steps of St. Paul’s, and the hours my brother and I spent mastering Duck Hunt. If kids didn’t remember their best days of television and gaming, countless individuals would walk this earth with blank slates where their childhood years ought to be. To quote the Mad Hatter, “Don’t let’s be silly!” Clearly … we remember.

Isn’t that truth more powerful than the illusion that somehow a childhood steeped in screens will be utterly void? The highlights stick. The overall feelings? They remain.

What a sacred privilege, then—and freedom, too!— to oversee the eventual background music of a person. That day when you were on, when the homemade play dough was fresh and you said yes to dragging out every single cookie cutter? The time spent talking, the cumulative hours of licking beaters while making cookies? Any of it might make the cut as a Best Day. Your casual approach to shoes? The sensation of feet sinking in to sun-warmed mud might just evoke eternal feelings of joy. And that season when you were rotten sick and it was video after video and over boiled noodles and jarred sauce for dinner, again? Maybe some day your child will come down with a rotten head cold and take an inexplicable level of comfort from spaghetti and Backyardigans reruns. Who’s to say?

Not me, that’s for sure.