The Shape of What I Remember

My terrible memory could be from my ADHD, or—God help me—signs of early dementia, or, like a lot of people in their sixties who say they can’t even remember where they left their keys five minutes ago, maybe it’s just an age thing.

There are long stretches of my life I don’t remember clearly. High school, especially, exists more as a feeling than a series of events. Faces blur. Years collapse. When I reach for details, my mind offers very little in return.

Those years were about survival. I was learning how to get through, how to stay upright, how to fit in. My attention was fixed on what came next, not on preserving what was happening. Survival doesn’t leave room for memory-making. It demands motion, endurance, and focus. Of course, those years did not settle in as stories. I was too busy getting through them.

Still, there are moments when this lack of memory feels like a failure.

Not long ago, a boy I knew in high school—a friend, briefly a boyfriend, or maybe just something close to one—found me on Facebook. He told me he had come across letters in a box he'd saved, along with letters from his mother and important friends from high school. I’d written to him while he was away at college. He said they moved him deeply. He remembered my words, the way they made him feel, the time we spent together. He shared memories with a clarity that startled me.

The letters didn’t jog my memory—only more of how I was in high school.

I didn’t remember a single moment he described; I was pleased to learn I was important in his life. I had no idea.

Sitting with his message, I felt ashamed as if my forgetting made me shallow, or careless, or cruel. As if the imbalance between his sharp memory and my blankness proved that I hadn’t cared as much as he had.

But that isn’t true.

What I remember of him is not a scene—it’s a feeling. I remember that we had fun together. I remember a fondness that ran deeper on my side than perhaps on his. I remember his shyness and a private pain he carried that made me pause. In the noise of high school, he stood out to me because he was quieter, more inward, more tender than others.

That is what I remember when I think of him.

I didn’t remember that he played lacrosse. Although once he mentioned it, I vaguely remembered that. He did not just play lacrosse. He was the captain of the team!

No memory.

I do remember that he was muscular and quite handsome. I’m sure, to my teenage self, that didn’t go unnoticed.

My lack of memory does not mean a lack of feeling. I'd like to believe it means the feelings and experiences lived too close to be archived.

Parenthood reminds me of this more clearly.

Those years—my children growing up—were the happiest of my life. I wasn’t surviving then. I was inhabiting. Fully inside the days, the repetition, the happy chaos, the intimacy of being needed. I remember someone saying to me, It goes by so fast, and feeling almost defensive—not because she was wrong, but because I was already doing what she was urging.

I wasn’t squandering those years. I wasn’t standing outside them, trying to preserve them for later. I was living them, very aware of how lucky I was to be living my dream: to be a mother. To be their mother.

Those memories, too, lack sharp edges. I sometimes see it as a failure when I can’t recall much for my grown children, the way my mother was able to do for me, well beyond her sixties. I’d like to believe that, rather than failure, it’s a consequence of being fully inside the joy of the moment—and then letting that moment go so the next could arrive.

Memory is often mistaken for proof. But sometimes love leaves no proof behind—only a shape, a weight, a truth that lives in the body rather than the mind.

What remains is not a collection of scenes, but a certainty: that I loved joyfully. That I was there. That I gave myself to the moment.

Or maybe it is just my ADHD brain, wandering off with my memories and forgetting to bring them back. I'd take that over the other two alternatives!