Part II: I Am What I Cannot Remember
I don’t remember much from my childhood. I remember we had a diabetic cat named Rocco who was so skinny you could see his rib bones. When Rocco ran away, we had the whole neighborhood looking and ended up finding him in our living room under an antique red velvet chair. I remember we went on family trips each year to Puerto Vallarta. There was a rectangular shaped koi pond outside with oversized fish too large for their habitat, and a “kid’s place” in a little hug by the beach where my sister and I would paint pottery turtles and fish; they would come back perfectly glazed and any mistakes made with the paintbrush the day before had magically disappeared. I remember I had a big blue circular floatie that I named Mary Moo Cow and that I would always say, with a tune, that our hotel La Jolla Mismaloya was a “poopy place.” I remember being dressed up in identical outfits to my sister, and wearing the same puffy pink snowsuit onesies when the wind gusts pushed us over as we struggled to climb the sand dunes in Northern Michigan. I remember finding a white pearly colored bead on the floor during nap time in junior kindergarten and sticking it up my nose because I thought it was pretty and I didn’t want anyone else to take it, and then having to go to the hospital for a lady with long fingernails to simply flick it out. I remember cutting my bangs off with a pair of dull kid’s scissors and placing them in a drawer in our playroom. The bangs took way too long to grow back, which was fine with me but bothered my parents. I remember when I used to run around the kitchen island with underwear on my head halfway covering my eyes, holding a giant Miss Piggy Pez Dispenser that would play a maddening melody that all of my family members—including myself—can repeat to this day.
Most of these things I recall because stories were told to me again and again, or because I have a woven box of colorful pictures from my childhood that showed me these moments—the ones I thought I would want to remember.
But what I couldn’t remember turned out to be what I wanted to remember most. I didn’t remember that my brown stuffed bear had to be perfectly placed on the far-right corner of my patterned mattress every night before I went to bed and remain there for the whole night, and my mom couldn’t even remember what would happen if it shifted, tilted, or—god forbid—fell off the red square. My flower night light had to be turned on in the hallway, the bathroom light on, and my door cracked open at a 30-degree angle. Whenever I said “goodnight” and “I love you” to my mom I needed her to say those exact words back in perfect sequence, without hesitation. I didn’t remember that I couldn’t physically fall asleep if all of these things did not happen.
I didn’t remember that I dressed myself each day in the same outfit for the entirety of Pre-K4: my pink and dark orange striped three-quarter length shirt with an embroidered heart on the front, my plastic beaded rainbow headband, and my worn-out black and red striped socks with holes in the heels. No matter what clothes my mom bought me, I wouldn’t budge—the pink and orange striped shirt always won.
I didn’t remember my therapist’s name, Dr. Whitlock. And I didn’t remember that I first met her in the pediatric doctor’s office, and then continued to see her for years in her tutor style home in Detroit. I didn’t remember her mannerisms, what she looked like, or how she talked. I didn’t remember what her voice sounded like until I heard it for the first time in ten years.
