Sunday, October 08, 2006
Archaeology
Walker: This is normal, right? As to-be-parents, Dana and I are looking for clues from our childhood to discover what our family life is going to be like - what the boys are going to be like.
Okay, okay. "Looking for clues" is too weak. Our search is archaeological. We're digging. Every bit of information we find about our childhood helps paint the picture. We are asking our parents what we were like as newborns, infants, and toddlers; pouring over every page of our baby books; watching every old 8mm home movie; and looking through countless family photo albums.
During the big dig, the thought occurred to me that we're searching for our lost memories. Dana and I obviously don’t remember being infants. Or toddlers. My life begins to fade in around age five, but those memories are foggy at best. In essence, we are recreating (creating?) the memories of our earliest days for the first time right now through our parents, home movies, and pictures. Through the focal lens of pending parenthood, we're just getting to the part of our lives where we’re babies. It's all happening a bit out of sequence.
But who likes a story told in the order that the events happened? For instance, many of my favorite movies are told out of sequence - Citizen Kane, Pulp Fiction, Life is Beautiful, to name a few. Who knows – maybe we like this type of narrative because we experience our own lives out of sequence...
Sorry. All this rambling about sequence and memory and childhood is an overly elaborate (so postmodern!) way of saying that I'm just now beginning to understand what people mean when they say they experience life through their children. Previously, I thought the phrase meant that the parent was experiencing life second-hand, but that's not it at all. It's a much more complex than that. It's looking inward and outward simulateously. And more. A lot more. I think.
Okay. That's all for now...I'm off to go dig up some more old photos.
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LOVE the childhood pictures. Your boys are going to be quite the ladies men. Can't wait to meet the little critters and wrestle :-)
xo--Mrs. Palmer
You better not have taken the picnic basket!(wink)
-Skeeter