Often, when I’ve told people things I remember as a young child, I get comments like, “You couldn’t have remembered all that!” Or, “You know that your memories are not really accurate.”
The words stung, partly because they were so familiar and partly because I knew my memories were all-too correct. My mother first told me that I couldn’t possibly remember things that happened when I was young. This came up when I told her how I remembered her mother, sister and brother cooing over my sister when she was a baby.
I am about two years older than my sister, so I would have been under three years old when I watched them put Lia (not her real name) on her tummy on a blanket in my grandmother’s living room. They placed toys around her and cooed at her, enticing her to pick the toy nearest them. I sat on my grandmother’s stiff antique couch, sucking a finger and rocking a little, feeling forgotten.
My aunt noticed that I felt left out and a brief flare of hope rose in my belly. But, incredibly, and I say this as an adult who knows what a two and a half year old looks like, and what most eighteen month-old toddlers can fathom, her eyes were devoid of warmth. Instead of handing me a toy or offering a bit of attention, all she said was, “That’s the breaks, kid. You aren’t the baby any more.”
When I dissolved into tears my uncle snapped a photo. After he got the film developed he handed my mother the photos, paying special attention to the one where “Krissy realized that she isn’t the baby any more.”
At two and a half—being shown no compassion, no camaraderie, was cold. But it wasn’t the reason that my mother got in my face when I told her that I remembered that moment.
“You were remembering when they did that with your brother,” she insisted, ”not your sister.”
“No, Mommy,” I insisted right back. ”It was when Lia was a baby. John is still a baby, kinda.”
John was two and Lia four, and I remembered very clearly both incidents. The pressure for me to “admit” that I couldn’t have remembered Lia’s “Blanket Time” as my relatives called it, wasn’t to prove my mother right that babies and young children can’t rely on their own memories. It was so that she could reassure herself that I couldn’t possibly remember the terrible things that her and my father had done before my sister was born.
But I did remember. The nights when my mother would leave me with a teenaged babysitter who would make out on the couch with her boyfriend and threaten to slap me if I complained. Nights when my father was out making special house calls to change the tubes in the televisions of sweet young things. My mother used those opportunities to visit local bars.
She’d stumble home past midnight, reeking of beer and Manhattans. Sometimes alone, which wasn’t too bad because that meant she would slap a few dollars into the babysitter’s hand and collapse onto her bed without bothering to get into her pajamas.
It was worse when she’d bring someone home. She knew how dangerous this was--that even though my father was sleeping with some of his ’clients’ that he would react violently if he caught her with another man. That was part of the fun, though Daring to go against my father’s authority as the head of the house by going to a bar, getting drunk and then actually having the nerve to bring another man into his home.
And I saw all of it because my crib was in the living room.
The night my mother brought home a man, when I was very, very young—maybe less than two, I’m not sure if my mother was pregnant with Lia yet or not—was not a good night at all. They both stumbled in, loud, laughing, smoking. When I coughed the man walked over to my crib and blew smoke in my face, then turned away without saying anything.
