Friday Flashback

This morning I tried to think of one of my earliest memories. The one I came up with is nothing more than a snapshot, but it got me thinking.

I don't know how old I was. I could not have been older than two. My parents used to have this gold velour bedspread. It was thin, but heavy. I think at some point I cut it with scissors, neat little v's that surely no one would notice. Anyway, the velour had a grain to it and I used to rub patterns into it with my fingers, exactly the way my children now do with my microfiber couch. I remember having a tactile aversion to the way the short fibers felt when pushed against their natural affinity to lay flat and shiny.

So, back to being two. I remember being put on my mother's bed for a nap wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a cloth diaper covered with clear plastic undies. The plastic undies had elastic around the legs and waist (as did the puffy sleeves of my cotton top) and the plastic had cracks and buckles that would pinch and irritate my tender, chubby thighs. I remember crying and crying, feeling betrayed to be left there (my poor mother) and feeling overwhelmingly uncomfortable, plastic and elastic cutting into my skin, chilly with no blanket, with that awful, unwelcoming velour on so much skin.

Looking at the situation from my mother's perspective it's easy for me to see that she was probably quite ready to have me out of her hair and quietly sleeping behind a closed door. But I remember feeling trapped. I felt awful and there was nothing I could do about it. My heart breaks to think of how often I fail to see a situation from my childrens' perspectives. Once when T was a baby I strapped her into her car seat while she fought and flailed. I was so frustrated with her, I shoved her in, clicked the straps tightly around her and tried, in vain, to talk myself down from my anger while she screamed and screamed and screamed. She had already been screaming before we got in the car, so I thought she was just carrying on. She finally fell asleep as we drove, but I discovered, upon getting her out of the car, that there was a sippy cup under her in the car seat that I had failed to see in the dark. She was strapped in there so tightly, it must have been really hurting her. Just thinking about it makes me tear up.

Because it's my job to protect my children. If there is one thing in this world that horrifies me, it is injustice. To be the perpetrator of injustice against my own children is one of the most miserable things I can imagine. I need to discipline them. I need to teach them. But I always want them to know I am on their side. I don't want to hurt them, to leave them alone in their time of need. Sometimes, like when they are babies, or when they are far from me, they can't tell me what they need. But sometimes they try to tell me, and in my fatigue and frustration I don't really hear them. I try to shoo their troubles away instead of soothe them away. I'm so focused on my own discomfort, I trivialize theirs.

I know every mother does this to some extent. We have to survive, after all. But I hope that this memory will trigger within me a greater desire to look at situations from my kids' perspectives, to try to imagine what they are feeling, to validate them. To hear them. I remember as a kid saying, "When I'm a mom, I'm going to..." I said this countless times, always ending the sentence with some way to keep my future self from performing an injustice of which I felt I'd been a victim. I hope I can live up to some of my childhood promises to myself, but I'm sure, even so, my kids won't escape childhood without their own lists of mistakes never to propagate.

But they will. It's the circle of life, and someday they'll have the added benefit of a parent's perspective. Oh, you'll have to excuse me. I just noticed some neat little v's cut into E's shirt.