Memory of our lives

 

July 11 2024

36 years old. Yesterday was my 14^th wedding anniversary. I have 8 children on earth, 2 children in heaven, and a uterus rotted for a year somewhere in some hospital’s biohazard dump. I know, barring a miracle, that I am done receiving new little souls in my body, to grow and live in the world. It hurts.

I realize how strange memory is. More and more, it feels like my own life is forgotten by me---the only things that remain were pinned down by words. Even things that I never wrote down, but if I described them to myself or others, then I can remember them. But otherwise, they fade away.

I used to think there was some part of my mind that recorded my own life. That all I had to do was access it, like a hidden file on a computer. But it seems that it’s not there. And scariest of all, it seems that people can rewrite their memories, or at least, completely reshape the story of it, without changing the bare facts. Like music to raw footage of a movie. The music changes everything. Especially disgruntled young people in their 20s and 30s, trying to make sense of their lives. Comparing the notes of their childhood with other siblings, other witnesses. Or when reading war-memoirs. The novelist author knew to pick out the really poignant parts, but even he had to pick. The heroism, the horror, little things that stuck out in it. Some guys go on and on about the details of all the fallen buddies---remembering their glasses, their names, their hometowns, as if somehow saving something precious. Some guys rambling on about minute details no one cares about---the rifle type, the little personal altercation with a higher up. And even in the war---the things the men chose to cling to. That one guy dying holding onto the little polaroid of his baby in the dark…even the way we cling to the story of our own life in little pieces of plastic. But it’s the act of recollection---the war memoirs themselves---that is so weird. Like in the Vietnam book, he chooses the framing to be about the lines Chan wrote in his Bible, even at the breakdown at the end. Two siblings so close in age can have drastically different memories or perceptions of the same few years. It seems the story of someone’s life can be utterly changed by the way they remember it---like the music the producers pick to pair with the raw footage everywhere. And picking which cuts to save, to string together in the final production. Our minds—editing the footage of our lives---can make such very different things.

I hope God holds all the raw footage. And the real music to be paired with the story. Only He knows the story He was really making.

Right now, my story doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t get why God took my babies. Why my uterus had to spectacularly fail, when I was pregnant with a little boy who was an answer to thousand prayers of Isaiah, and whom I felt was going to do something important for God’s Kingdom.

Right now, in suburbia, after the trial of Grad-School, Josh stuck with a Job that he doesn’t feel any higher purpose in, other than trying to pay off an overpriced house squeezed into a quarter-lot in a desert….passing the point of the dream of Josh with the torch on the hill in the rain on the bare mountain…..I don’t know what our purpose is.

I feel….lost.

Like I’m halfway through a book and realize it’s not going anywhere. I see wrinkles popping up in  my face. I see a huge scar cut across my baby-stretched belly, holding the skin in strangely. I have passed the point of potential….with careful treatment, optimistically, I may look young for another decade. But I have passed 20 years of doing this—being 16 and the age I could be in an adventure story---now I’m 36 and too old for an adventure story. At least, the kind where its about potential and choices that shape a life. My life is shaped. And in one sense….it feels over.

I know that’s a ridiculous thing to say. Even me writing this, is shaping how I feel. Words are recursive like that. Even our attempts to understand our life re-shape our life. Or perhaps give it shape that can fit into our little finite brains.

Only God knows what true story is going on here.

Maybe when God shows us the final cut of our lives, the final story, the most important parts will be small scene that we didn’t even remember, or that we chose to leave on the cutting room floor.

I have 8 children counting on me. 8 little potentials whose lives are flung in front of them like empty vistas with stormy skies above them. 7 little maidens who will be that beautiful main character ninja girl in an adventure story. 1 young man ripe for his coming of age adventure. I need to help him. I have hurt his confidence so much.

God, help me help Isaiah be a man. Help me. Help me be the mother I never have been.  Heal him where I have let him down.

And please bring him the right woman at the right time, bring him Eve. Helpmeet. Help him become who you want him to become.

I think what has stopped me from writing in diaries for 8 years was how recursive they get. How they seem to reshape (or concretize) my own life and my own thinking. It seemed oddly untrue---squeezing the reality of my life into a mold or a shape, that wasn’t all true---as if I am writing a computer program to program my own brain…it felt artificial, forced, a lie somehow.

But lately, I think about my memories of my own life, and realize I’m always doing that. Always shaping reality with words. I just hadn’t written them down.

And I’m getting older. I’m forgetting my own life. The kids will tell me recent (or 7 yr old) memories of things that Mommy said and did that sound very plausible, but I have zero recall of. Some of them are really good memories too. I wish I remembered them. I’m glad that they do. But I think my aging brain needs some help pinning down my own life. It feels like its passing in a blur….and I have nothing to fill the time that I know lapsed.

I want to write now. Write down the memories, even if it turns out is half-fake and sifting, and artificial. God will save the truest story. I will write my fragments, and He can correct all the errors in the final analysis.

I need to write about losing my babies. I need to write about 2023