Misremembering

How reliable are our memories? I have absolutely no trouble believing that most of us would pass a polygraph test when it comes to recounting events from the past. But just because we remember something doesn’t mean that it happened that way. Time has a habit of adding to, or taking away the actions, the words, the feelings involved in an event. I think some of the things I say I remember I don’t actually remember them at all but I have heard the stories so often that they become memories.

Years ago we were visiting friends. They had two young daughters who were playing outside at the time. The youngest fell over and came indoors bawling her eyes out. It should have been easy to deal with, a cuddle, a plaster perhaps to cover a grazed knee. It should have been simple. My friend looked at her daughter, and then at me, and said, ‘Oh, you poor child. Has Mel been mean to you?’ Mel was drinking tea and had no connection to the injury. The girl, looked at me, looked at he mum and said, ‘Yes.’ What? I felt a heavy sense of injustice. I had been labelled as mean to a five-year old girl. There was no telling her that I had nothing to do with her falling over, that I wasn’t there. She knew, without doubt, that I had done something mean to her. She told people, her dad, my husband, her sister, her next-door neighbour, the cat sitting on the fence, who incidentally had witnessed the falling over, that I had been mean to her. The truth that never was a truth took on the mantle of memory.

Here's a memory…

Summer 1968

It came with the morning

the knowledge that we were not visitors

The bed, not mine,

the nightgown, not mine.

the room, the window, the framed pictures of embroidered wisdom –

all not mine.

An orphanage tagged on to

a convent tagged on to a church -

everything orderly and neat

A front door opens, the hallway tiles blue and yellow

We sit up straight in a large sitting room, 

A ticking clock marks the slow minutes,

beeswax and the warm shine of dark mahogany dressers,

books, spines straight and dusted.

A clean room with chairs at crisp right-angles.

no cushions., no quiet tranquillity

just cold functionality.

Mother Mary regards us from a shelf,

dressed in a long blue gown, impossibly small feet exposed,

she smiles and extends a hand offering comfort.

as if she knows what is ahead

The orphanage is at capacity,

says the nun through sour lips.

The children will have to double up

‘God is watching’,

A stitched threat in grim colours on the wall

Sunshine, shouts and laughter outside

Winter bleakness descends

But I know the God who is watching me

Watching me

Watching my brothers and sisters

Watching my mother in hospital

The God who is watching

Loves me

The poem was based on a memory of a childhood event. I was ten years old. A summer stretched before me, a father buried, a mother in hospital and no one to step in just for a while. There were five of us, two sisters, two brothers and me.

What I liked about being in the orphanage was the ribbons I got to wear. We didn’t have ribbons at home. But everything else I didn’t like. We didn’t get to sit together at a table for meals for one thing. We didn’t get to sleep in the dormitory.

But then I got to thinking about whether what I remember was what really happened. How much of my ten-year-old distress coloured the events? I’m not sure that the sitting room was so sombre. I think I might be describing the waiting room of our dentist. There was no statue of Mary there for sure, but the mahogany furniture and the ticking clock were there.

My knowledge of nuns was limited, perhaps gleaned from watching The Sound of Music, but these nuns were not of the cheerful, singing kind.  My experience of the Roman Catholic Church was not favourable. The one we attended was not child friendly. It was all serious and sitting up straight and not smiling. We jumped through all the required hoops, but the jumping lacked joy. I came through it believing that God was severe, and he was joyless.

The last verse there? I hate to end on a negative note. I want to leave the reader with hope, The tapestry picture on the wall was there in sombre colours. I took it as a threat. I didn’t know then that God loved me. I did not know the God who was watching me, not then. Yes, He was watching and, yes, He did love me, but I didn’t know that then. The orphanage frayed the edges of me. But did it?

I think the frayed edges were always there long before the orphanage. I was just that kind of a person. I don’t know if the orphanage caused the damage I believed it did. It wasn’t a good experience for sure, but it probably wasn’t as bad as I remember. How bad can things really be when a group of children you don’t know teach you to do an Irish jig? It secured my Entertainer’s Badge in Brownies.

Even the clearest of memories might not be that clear at all. We take them down from the shelf and polish them up, but does it match up to the original events? Even if it does, does it come with a use-by date if it is such an unpleasant one? How do we lay aside a memory that appears to cripple us? One of my older sisters returned to the orphanage years later to extend forgiveness. I think that is the way forward – to forgive, not because someone deserves. Forgiveness really isn’t about the other person – it is about us and freeing ourselves to move forward without dragging the corpse of a bad event behind us.

And the good memories? Don’t poke them. Don’t dissect them. Just let them be.