Memorialize

Before my daughter was born it occurred to me to create audio recordings for when she was older. It was during the lockdown of Covid and I liked the idea of capturing thoughts and family history. I got an external hard drive to put all of these on as well as photos and any videos of her or the family so she’d have them. 

She’s just three now but my hope is that someday these will mean something to her. 

Who can say, ya know?

It’s a hope. 

What bums me out is that since her birth I haven’t taken the time to keep doing the audio recordings. I still do occasional dumps of photos and videos of her onto the hard drive but I haven’t recorded anything and that bothers me. I’d like her to have a feeling of who she was, and indeed who we were, at this age. I grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s and my folks didn’t take a lot of photos of the family so, with my dodgy memory, I can’t recall a lot of who I was as a kid. 

Modern kids have it a little differently. 

With so much technology at our fingertips, it’s easy to capture moments but context is needed. A photo or video only tells part of the story. A narrative tells WHY these things happened or WHAT they meant. 

It fills in the blanks. 

So much of our personal and family histories is relegated to memories or photos and later generations like my daughter don’t get much of a chance to understand who people were to them or what their childhood was like. I want to at least try to give her some of that. 

For what it’s worth. 

Who we are as kids, before the world gets its hands on us and molds us, shakes us, and tries to break us, comes in the form of vague recollections and dusty photos. While a narrative is still clouded by the storyteller’s own bias it’s still more information. 

I feel bad because my daughter will never know her grandmothers, and only knew one of her grandfathers for her first year and a half. Beyond that, she knows one aunt and sorta knows some of her other extended family. It’s nice to tell her about myself, about her mother, and about her family. It’s nice to be able to give future her an idea of the hands that made the world in which she was born. It’s hard to come to terms with the reality that someday she’ll get angry and frustrated with me and grow distant as most kids do as they begin to search for who they are, but I just hope that in learning who I was, who I am, that she’ll see the person within her father. 

It’s easy to get caught up in that fear of missing out, wanting to capture anything and everything that seems important but you can’t forget to live too. Our lives are littered with moments we can never recapture or rekindle. We can never have it back. We can take a picture, take a video, or write about it but the fact is that the moment is a candle that blows out. It’s a dream you wake from or a nightmare you survive. It’s easy to forget that life is for living, not re-living, and while it’s good to remember the good and bad times, and to capture some of those moments, but we aren’t meant to live forever. Take those fleeting moments away and it takes away the heart of what makes life special. Those blink and you miss them miracles that give life the seasoning that is so different for each person. 

I can never capture every important moment in my daughter’s life but I don’t want to. I want to try to capture some of who she is, who she was, and who she can be. Beyond that, it’s her life to live and her memories to make and while I will always be a part of them, she deserves nothing less than to give this life and its moment the importance they deserve or don’t, and that feels like an important lesson I need to remember. 

…c…