My mother was staying with me the week I gave birth to my first son. As a nervous new mom I spent much of our time together quizzing her about my own babyhood.
"Did I cry a lot when I was first born?"
"When did I first start getting teeth?"
"At what age did I start sleeping through the night?
My mother, for whom I was the third child in as many years, would inevitably respond to all such queries in the same way,
"Oh, God, I have NO idea. I've blocked out a lot of that time from my memory."
At the time the idea that my mother would acknowledge purging large sections of my infancy from her mind was shocking to me.
But now that I have three children of my own - I have to admit that I kinda get it.
As I start to potty train my second and third children it amazes me how fuzzy the memories of potty training my first have already become. I try to remember how long it took and I genuinely can't recall. I attempt to conjure up memories of the move from the potty to the toilet and I just don't know exactly how that ended up happening. At the time these events seemed completely monumental, but now, less that two years later, I don't have much recall of them at all.
I think such "memory fades" serve a good purpose. They allow us to look back on our children's early years as a sort of a happy, chaotic blur, rather then as a series of difficult phases (colicy infant, teething one-year-old, potty training toddler). Our brains do us the favor of sanding the rough edges off of those tougher times and leaving us with fuzzier, yet generally more pleasant memories.
And who knows how useful those memories would really be anyway even if we did have access to them? Sure, my older son might have transitioned from the potty to the toilet in three weeks, but that doesn't mean that his brother or sister will be ready to do the same.
So, I've given up on searching my memory bands for "how this all went last time" and I've committed to starting fresh with each kiddo. And I suggest you do the same.
Let's face it, our brains wouldn't have it any other way.
