I don’t have many memories of my life, and the memories I do have are, at best, sketchy. Who knows if it’s trauma, partying in my younger years, or menopause that makes it this way, but it is real. Some are little more than fragments; flashes of people, places and moments that have survived the passage of time. Others feel clearer, although I have come to realise that clarity does not necessarily mean certainty.
Because memory is a strange thing.
So much of what we remember is not simply what happened, but how we experienced what happened. Our memories are coloured by our emotions, our understanding at the time, and everything that has happened to us since.
For years, I struggled with that.
I would share a memory with someone, only to be told, “No, that’s not how it happened.” Because their recollection seemed so certain, I would retreat into myself and wonder if I had made mine up.
Perhaps I had misunderstood. Had I imagined it. Or maybe there was something wrong with me.
Only within the last year have I begun to understand something that has brought me an enormous sense of peace. We can experience the very same event and remember it completely differently.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that one of us is lying, confused or imagining things.
It means we are human.
We each experience life through the lens of our own emotions, our own history, everything we learned along the way. What hurts one person may barely register with another. What feels significant to one may seem insignificant to someone else. What one person remembers as a moment of joy, another may remember as a moment of sadness.
That realisation has changed the way I look at my own past.
I no longer feel quite so compelled to question every memory simply because someone else’s version is different from mine. I feel sorry for those who believe their recollection must be the correct version because they remember it that way.
One day, perhaps, they too will realise there isn’t always a single version of the truth. This is an awakening I have had about my own past and my own history, and it is peculiar to me, and me alone.
It has taken me fifty-three years to arrive at this understanding, and there is peace in it.
A peace in finally believing that I am not mad. That there isn’t something fundamentally wrong with me. The things which have driven me to despair for years. Questioning my own recollection and my own experience. It may not have been a problem with me at all.
Perhaps the problem was simply that I didn’t understand how differently human beings can experience the same thing. We don’t just remember events, we remember how those events made us feel. Feelings are shaped by everything that came before them. Shaped by our childhoods, our relationships, our fears, our hopes, our experiences and the wounds we carry without even realising.
I think my earliest memory is of being visited by a social worker. He was a lovely man, a tall, jolly man with dark ginger hair and a big ginger beard. He was kind and softly spoken, and each week he worked with my sister, Sharon, and I to help us make sense of our lives.
We had been taken in by our grandparents and brought into a family that already existed. A family of three girls. Sharon, the eldest, who was known as “Big Sharon” after we came along, much to her dismay. Caroline, the middle daughter. Sandra, the youngest, who was exactly ten years older than us.
Once a week, he would sit with Sharon and I in our living room and help us write our family story.
Looking back, I imagine it was something of a fairy tale, or perhaps a prettier, more sanitised version of events. The version designed to make two young children understand something that the adults perhaps didn’t entirely know how to explain.
We created a scrapbook filled with photographs, pictures and words that we wrote ourselves. It began with something along the lines of: Mummy Gill and Daddy Christopher couldn’t look after us anymore…and then, each week, we would add another piece to the story.
I don’t remember it being particularly emotional. I remember it being confusing. It was almost as though we were writing somebody else’s story. Something that belonged to the adults around us rather than had actually happened to me. Once the social worker had gone, life simply carried on.
The trouble, I think, came later. When we became teenagers, with raging hormones and all the emotions that come with growing up, our story began to take on a different meaning.
For Sharon, in particular, the realisation that our parents had not been able to care for us. In her eyes, they had therefore not wanted us became something she struggled with terribly.
It was a wound she carried for the rest of her life. Sadly, a life that was to end far too soon. Far too soon for her. Far too soon for me.
Don’t get me wrong. We had a good life. We learned to call our grandparents Mum and Dad, although apparently that didn’t happen immediately. At first, they were Mummy and Grandad. My mum had found this quite amusing when she recalled it years later.
I don’t actually remember that myself, although I have a vague recollection of it somewhere in the back of my mind.
We grew up in a big family, and in my childhood I was oblivious to the undercurrent that existed around us. I’m not even sure it would be right to give it a name and certainly “Hate” feels too strong a word. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely outside the realms of it either.
This is where that understanding of emotion and experience becomes so important to me. Because when Sharon and I arrived, we didn’t simply enter a new home, we entered an already established family. A family with its own routines, its own relationships, its own rhythms and its own little world. Although what happened was undoubtedly done out of love for family, it must have been an enormous upheaval for everyone involved.
Imagine having your carefully established family life suddenly changed because two young children arrive who need a home.
Our story is that we were “rescued” from a mother who was leaving us unattended.
Sharon was eighteen months old. I was six months. Our mother, Gillian, was only seventeen or eighteen herself. From everything I understand, she had very little support. Her husband, my dad, had left her while she was in hospital having me, leaving her to cope alone.
Eventually, our grandparents, Sylvia and Brian, decided that the best thing for us was to come and live with them. The plan, as I understand it, was that Gillian would sort herself out and come back for us when she was able to.
Only that day never came.
We stayed.
Eventually, those grandparents became Mum and Dad. There is however another side to that story which I didn’t understand as a child. They weren’t simply becoming our parents, they were becoming our parents inside a family that already belonged to someone else.
The older girls had their routines and their lives.
“Big” Sharon only recently got a room of her own after years of sharing a crowded bedroom with Caroline and Sandra. It was only the box room, but it was hers.
And then we arrived.
And she lost it. Her bit of independence, her own space, her place within the family hierarchy, changed because two babies needed somewhere to sleep.
I can only imagine what that must have felt like for her.
Then there’s Sandra. The baby of the family. At only ten years old, had to navigate all the emotions of no longer being the cherished baby of the family. It must have felt like a take-over to her.
Yet, from everything I remember, they dealt with it with an extraordinary amount of good nature. They didn’t just tolerate us. They mothered us, and for many years, we had good relationships.
Perhaps that is another part of my story I am only now beginning to understand. There can be love and resentment in the same family. Gratitude and hurt. Joy and loss.
And sometimes, all of those things can exist at exactly the same time. It shouldn’t be feared and swept under the carpet never to be spoken about. It was in our family and the resentment grew.
Perhaps that is what makes our memories so complicated. We are not remembering events. We are remembering our experience of them. Perhaps, finally, I am learning to trust that my experience is allowed to be mine. Their experiences are just as valid and we should all be applauded for dealing with it in the way we did.
But we are all still learning to be emotionally intelligent, it’s taken me 53 years! I wish I could have learned this with “little” Sharon by my side still…but we are all on our own journey and she will always be a huge lesson for me. I will always have her in my heart. I hope she knows that she was loved.
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