Repressed Memories

Do you trust your memory? I don't mean trust your memory in the sense of trusting that you'll not forget to pick up milk on the way home - I mean trust that the things you remember are true? That they actually happened the way you see them replayed in your mind? I have often wondered if I am a revisionist, if I simply remember things the way I want or need to remember them in order to justify this behaviour or that fear in my life. So many of the major events in my life are surrounded by contradictory viewpoints - my mother remembers it one way, my sister another way, both of them the opposite of what I remember. Historically I have been quick to doubt myself (although quietly, and without showing them I have any skepticism about my version of events), but now I wonder if it is simply something we all do. Are none of us completely right? Is the truth somewhere in between our individual versions? Do we simply shut out the things we cannot face?

My memory is long and detailed, full of sensory images that queue the vision each time I encounter that smell/sight/sound again. The first memory I have is from when I was two years old. I was sitting in a tiny bedroom on my Aunt's knee. I had a fever, I was eating a bag of potato chips. Mum and Dad were fighting - just out of sight but within earshot. Mom is angry because I was sick and Dad wants to take me to his mother's house to fix it. My mother wants to know why Dad doesn't trust her judgement, Dad thinks she is silly and just wants a second opinion. Eventually an ultimatum of some kind is handed out, and Dad leaves. It occurs to me that Dad is gone forever, and that this fight is all my fault. My mother comes in and shouts at my Aunt for giving me chips.

I have always remembered this day. Years later, when I was thirteen, I would ask my Aunt about that night. I told her the story and she was shocked at how much I knew. It turns out this was the fight that eventually ended my parents marriage, they were divorced within a year. There were things I left out - my sister was there too, only six months old and laying in a bassinet nearby. There were things I added in - I always remembered it taking place in a house we didn't live in until several years later. I am fairly certain the emotions I "experienced" in the memory were ones I inserted later in life, once I had a greater understanding of what that moment in time had meant. None the less it taught me to trust my memory, to count it as one of my strengths.

I leaned on that confidence in years to come, when the many battles between my mother and I raged on into a full blown war. She countered every memory I threw at her, challenging my interpretation of every argument and event down to what I had for breakfast that morning. I remained steadfast in my self-belief. I would threaten her with tape-recorders, convinced that if I taped these conversations and played them back to her I would be vindicated and she would be shamed into confession. "I don't remember that" became my mother's defense, the weapon of choice in her arsenal. Because if she couldn't remember it, it never happened. Eventually she started to break me.

After all, I lied all the time.

My days at school were filled with elaborate stories, little exaggerations to cover the absence of normality occurring within my home life. Why don't I have to pay for school lunches? [Because my family was poor and we got free lunches] Because I am so silly with money that my mother comes in every week and pre-pays my lunches, of course! What does my mom do for a living? [Cleans houses and waits tables] She runs her own business, but I don't really understand what she does. What's that? My mother cleans your parents' house? [Of course she does, this is a small fucking town and all of you rich kids have parents who hire housekeepers] Oh she was helping out a friend who was sick for a while, she is really nice like that.

As I got older, and the problems at home became more serious (and more embarrassing for a teenager), the lies became more elaborate. After all, I was now covering for a suicidal mother, daily panic attacks and a burgeoning eating disorder. I could barely keep up with the fibs myself anymore. How could I trust my memory now?

My sister has always used her memory differently - by ignoring it, pretending it doesn't exist. For years she managed to shut out an entire portion of her youth and teenage life. The times I looked to her for back up were riddled with her parroting my mother's "I don't remembers" as though they were in on this great scheme together. It maddened me, pushed a distance between us that I couldn't (wouldn't) explain for many years. Soon my "memory" became a liability, the thing the family could cling to in order to prove I was negative, that I thought I was better than them. My falsification of childhood events were simply the result of some emotional defect, an odd need to justify the cold space between me and my loved-ones.

That's how I saw it, anyway.

But recently, the tides have been turning. My most recent confrontation with my mother resulted in an apology - her first apology (as far as I can remember). For the first time she acknowledged the wrongs, admitted to them, and admitted the effect they must have had on me. It was liberating, frightening, confusing. Next, AJ began to accept my versions of events. Once again I was left standing, mouth agape, wondering whether I had won or lost - or why and when I started fighting in the first place.

This validation is a double edged sword - I feel relieved that I can trust myself again, hopeful for the future of these relationships in my life. Yet at the same time there is this guilt. Why couldn't I have just let it go? My new and infantile experience with motherhood has opened my eyes to the panic and scope for disaster that being a parent brings. My poor mother - just a child when I was born, sick for most of her adult life, abandoned by everyone she loved - why couldn't I have just forgiven her without making her admit to all those mistakes? And AJ - why did I need her to re-live all that pain with me? Why could I not just be happy that she couldn't remember the things I had tried my whole life to forget?

I never anticipated the day when my family would see me as right, as having figured it out before them. I had grown accustomed to my role as the drama-queen, the black sheep. But now that time is here, where do we go with it? How do we start to climb over that vast chasm I have worked so hard to widen over the years?

I don't know, really. What I do know is that standing here, looking out to them from this precipice, I am petrified. But I am also excited, eager, and ready to embrace the family that I have always loved so much but have been too afraid to let love me.