Thing

Every month I plan to publish one new story or new chapter to a story. This month's is a part memoir, part fiction story I wrote for a class a few years ago. I hope you enjoy! #monthlystory

The #memory is a funny #thing. If you ask ten people who witnessed one event, you'll get ten stories, maybe with some overlapping details, but there will be ten unique stories. Sometimes the details can even be as wildly unique as the person telling them.

Take my mom for example.

My mom has this horrendous habit of remembering things differently than they happened. These memories often have a tendency to differ, and differ quite significantly, from what everyone else remembers and sometimes they change with time.

Don’t get me wrong, we all do this sometimes, but my mom takes it a step too far by trying to convince us to remember things in the same way she does, and force other people to take her view on the story, or risk somehow feeling like a societal leper. She very frequently succeeds at this.

It actually terrifies me to see someone succeed at this with such frequency because no one should have this kind of power over other people. I find myself further terrified by the fact that I must live with the knowledge of being raised by a person who does it regularly. Simply knowing that people out there can do this is one thing; knowing my mother tried, and probably succeeded is even worse.

The first time I ever noticed her doing this was my senior year of high school. I’d spent most of my life thinking something was wrong with me because my brain didn’t remember things the same way as her. The way she felt was the only way.

My mom loves pictures to keep her family close. We have had entire walls of photos all my life and on this day, my mom and I were discussing some of the photos while my sister rushed around the kitchen making dinner, banging pots and pans on occasion. It was going well until I came across my favorite picture of my sister, my dad, and me. In the photo my hair is in two tight French braids and my sister’s curls fall just past her jawline. We are all smiling at my mom who is behind the camera and squinting in the sun.

“I had so much fun when we took this picture. I remember wanting to move to Texas so bad on that vacation” I said, pointing at the picture in a white frame and smiling at the memory.

“That picture isn’t from that trip," she told me in that obnoxious tone she gives when she wants you to believe her, but she knows she's wrong. "That happened on our first trip to Galveston after we moved to Texas."

"We took that picture on vacation when we lived in Michigan. I used to love that tank top and I got rid of it because it had holes after the trip," I replied, calmly pointing again to the picture in question where we stood on concrete steps as salty waves lapped at the stones lining the coast as my mom snapped the picture.

"We never vacationed to Galveston before we moved."

I looked at the photo as if it might give me some shred of proof that I could show her, whether or not she would believe. The camera had beared witness to the events that day, the rain, the wind. Since we had vacationed during the rainy season and it had poured down most of the time, you could see the doom and gloom of another very wet day looming in the clouds of the photo as they roiled, much like my brain trying to decipher clues from the photo.

I turned to face her as I began to explain, "You're right, we didn't—"

"Exactly."

"—but we did visit Galveston when we left Aunt Sharon's when we came to Texas. We had dinner at that awful Madam something or other's in Austin, then we headed to Galveston the next day after the rain had cleared," I explained, adding a cringe for effect as I talked about the restaurant. "And it rained so hard the one day that the steps to the shed in Aunt Sharon's yard looked like a teeny, tiny waterfall. We left her house and headed to the coast. The weather was clear until we got there."

I love rain and that day was cemented in my head because the magic of the rain and the smell of the ocean made a very depressed younger me feel just a little bit better as it mingled with the smell of salt and sand as they gently blew across our faces. I remembered thinking that this must be what heaven was like. The salty, rainy smell of the Gulf that day as the sound of the waves soothed my soul changed me. That picture always takes me back to that feeling, which is why I find myself so confident in something as faulty as memory when it comes to that day.

Mom interrupted my thoughts by adding, "Yeah, and then the wind got so bad we were sandblasted and had to hide in some little shop.”

"That was after we moved," I said, flatly, keeping my emotions at bay, refusing to let her ruin such an important memory with that painful day.

Every second of this conversation was frustrating me more, so I looked away from my mom, taking in the smell of my sister's cooking as I looked more closely at the photo remembering that it was taken on a digital camera in 2006 or 2007 and there might be a date stamp. We moved in 2008 and had visited Galveston countless times since then, but this image was not on one of those trips and there was no convincing me otherwise.

As I stared I noticed another photo out of the corner of my eye from a different trip taken in Galveston on the wall collage. It was the one from the day my mom had mentioned where the sand literally blasted us and got in our hair and eyes and tore up our skin. We rushed back to the hotel so that my mom, sister, and I could all clean our contacts, but we had to hide out in a shop until the wind died down. That day taught me a lesson: even heaven can become hell when you’re not prepared. This photo had been taken before the painful sand had destroyed my hair which was perfectly styled and tied back. This was clearly taken several years after the former. It was in the same place and with similar weather, but my face had aged and my adolescent body had become a woman's body with my full breasts jutting out further than in the image whose origin was being debated. My hair was lighter and my skin tanner which was accented by the blue dress I adorned in the new photo I was looking at. There was no way they could be mistaken for the same vacation.

Or so I thought.

“This picture is from the sandblasting trip,” I told her, pointing to the one where I had grown.

"They were on the same trip. I'm telling you," my mom argued, refusing to even acknowledge the physical changes between the photos.

The smell of my sister’s cooking was making me hungry, and the hungrier I got, the less I could have a civilized conversation about this.

“Mom,” I started with a lot more attitude than I meant. “Look at me. Look at how much older I look. We bought that blue dress after we moved. Those necklaces weren’t in fashion before we moved.”

My mom’s face told me all I needed to know. She was questioning herself. I have always been into fashion. When I was in high school, I would ask to get fabric, patterns, and jewelry kits for my birthdays and Christmases to make the fashion items that we could not afford. My mom could not argue with my knowledge of fashion without calling into question something which had been so fundamental to my identity at the time.

“Ask your sister. Sarah?" she said, which was about as close to a concession as she would give me.

"What's up?" Sarah asked, exiting the kitchen where dinner was being made to the living room where my mom and I were.

"This photo was after we moved to Texas, right?" my mom steered my sister.

Sarah wiped her thick hands on the apron I had made for her and looked closely at the picture. I could tell she was assessing what she would say to mom more than the photo. Sarah always wanted us to keep the peace and tried to help it along as much as she could.

"I think it might have been, but I'm really not sure," my sister answered as I discovered the date stamp at the bottom of the photo.

"Look," I said, pointing. "There's a date stamp on the bottom. April 2006."

"Hmmm…" my mom was trying to concoct an excuse for not remembering correctly. "I guess you're right, but I still think they were taken on the same trip.”

That was the moment I really knew that I was not the problem. I knew that no matter what the truth was and regardless of the evidence at hand, in my mother’s mind I would always be wrong. This understanding has helped me through the years, but there’s one memory she tries to change that still gets to me. I’ve been fighting against it for years, and she tried this tactic when my boyfriend, now of two years, and I were still getting to know each other, but he, like me, is not very good at being convinced of things without proof, and that's part of the reason my mom gets angry with me: I refuse to let her suck me into her unwitting lie and she’s starting to become frustrated with my boyfriend for being the same way.

But, the first time she ever tried this tactic with him, and certainly not the last, was on her birthday a year and a half-ago.

We were finishing up my mom’s birthday dinner when it happened. I hated bringing my boyfriend around my mom because of how she is, but this one night had been so nice right up until this point. We were sharing Mexican food laughing and chuckling for most of the night when we got to talking about my sister’s kids and how one liked the pacifier and the other did not.

My mom decided it was high time to start in on her favorite story. I think she tells it because it's an easy way to bring people over to her view about me. She claims she likes to tell it because it's an important part of who I am. She uses it to define me and tries to get other people, like my boyfriend, on her side, disregarding the fact that I have changed since it happened.

We were engaged with my sister about her kids and I knew this story was coming when she said, "Did she tell you about her pacifier?"

My boyfriend looked at her with the most confused look I've ever seen on his face and said, "Um, no?"

I later found out his confusion was because he was wondering how this conversation had gone from my niece and nephew to me. Eventually, he would adapt to these conversation shifts and brush off the absurdities that my mom likes to jump to, but this first instance confused him.

"You had to have been, what? Like eleven or twelve?" my mom started.

Over the years, I've gotten older in the story. The first time I remember hearing the story, I was about 12 and remembered the event clearly, still do, and she said I was 6 in the story. When she tells it now, I'm about the age I was the first time I heard the story, but I remember being younger when it happened, like 9-10. I'm not claiming my memory is the end-all-be-all when it comes to this story because memories are faulty, but I do know that this one story does not define me. No one story defines anyone. My age in this story is irrelevant to who I am, but it's important to note how memories can evolve, not just that they are different for everyone.

As my mom tells it, I was digging through the jam-packed, barely enterable, abyss, horror-movie-looking, island of lost toys we called a garage. When my sister and I were kids my mom thought the abyss was a little dangerous for us to go into, so I am not totally sure why I would have been digging through it by myself. Maybe they sent me to get something while we were working together outside and they waited nearby just in case I got sucked in and they had to rescue me. Maybe I was being defiant because that is not unlike me. Maybe I needed something to make kiddie art, as I often did. I try so hard to justify why she remembers it that way and over the years, I have probably come up with a hundred different reasons for her memories, but none of them feel right.

As I remember it, the family was cleaning out the abyss because my mom was on one of her not-so-spring cleaning kicks where we had to tackle the impossible in a day. My parents were pulling stuff out of it and my sister and I were disposing of the junk or placing the stuff we would keep aside and trying to organize it the best we, as kids, could do. We did this kind of thing at least once a week while I was growing up and into adulthood. We had to clean, and tear out, and refurbish/refinish a lot to make our homes and yards and whatnot look good. The work was hard, but I learned far more than most people my age will ever know about home repairs.

After the introduction, my boyfriend looked at me for aid because I have told him about the horror story of a garage and how we weren't really allowed in without parental aid. I always highlighted the stories by asking, “I mean without a parent close by, who would summon us from the abyss if we went in too deep?”

I gave my boyfriend a shrug as my mom proceeded with the story.

“So, she found her pacifier digging through the garage.”

I took a deep breath, letting the fact that I had not been digging go, besides, that was not the important part of the story. Regardless of how we happened upon the moment, I found my pacifier. I used to call it my "Thing" when I was old enough to talk. It was my faithful companion for the first two years of my life, and shortly after my sister was born, it was taken from me. My very short life was quickly turned upside down by the addition of a sister, so my Thing meant the world to me.

As I remember this day, my Thing was lying in some dirt near the entrance to the garage when I picked it up.

I wiped it off, as my mom can attest to.

And this is where the story gets vastly different.

The way I remember it:

I wiped it off to place it in my pocket and keep it as a memento, but before I could do so; I looked at my parents to share my discovery and tell them, "Hey, look, I found my Thing."

I was excited because it was sentimental to me. I was not emotionally close to my parents until about three years ago and I'm twenty-six now, so at the time, without putting it in my mouth, this Thing, which had offered me comfort for the first two years of my life, offered me comfort once more in the form of memories in better times.

"No," my parents both screamed.

My mom yanked it from my hand and threw it in the trash. I contemplated pulling it out, but decided it wasn't worth another of the frequent fights with my mom.

"I wasn't going to put it in my mouth, guys," I told them, with an eye roll.

I was a kid and all too often adults don't hear kids which is why my mom decided I was lying to them and the first piece of childhood was discarded before I was grown enough to understand why.

But my mom sees the story differently.

The way my mom tells it:

"Guys, I found my Thing," I shouted with joy as I looked at it, wiping it off to prevent placing dirt in my mouth when I inevitably would return it to the place it once called home.

I was possessed by my Thing as I drew it nearer to my mouth, eagerly anticipating its return to my life. My eyes were crazed as I imagined how it would feel as I sucked on it once more. (I imagine I was laughing maniacally as it neared my parted lips, but this is not part of how my mother tells it or acts it out; however, she makes the crazed eyes as she mimes bringing my Thing closer to her mouth in slow motion)

"NO!" they screamed as they looked upon the scene in horror (my mom always throws her arms up as she tells this part in a motion to stop).

Two weeks it had taken to break me. TWO WEEKS of screaming bloody murder. Two weeks of yearning for my Thing and making sure everyone knew by screaming incessantly. They would not go through that again. (She always added this part for emphasis on how desperately I yearned for my Thing once again)

My mother forcibly tore it from me and hid it in the trash can.

"I wasn't going to put it in my mouth," I lied with an attitude unbefitting of the six-year-old she claimed I was originally, but not that far off of that of the twelve-year-old I was in this rendition.

My parents weren't going to take any chances with my lies and forced me to leave it in the trash where it was.

Who knows which story is the actual truth. My mom used to always tell us that somewhere between the two sides is the truth.

Ironically enough, the other thing she used to say was, “Believe some of what you witness, half of what you see, and none of what you hear.”

Maybe some part of me wanted to put my Thing back in my mouth. Maybe things are less black-and-white than either of us remember.

Regardless of wherever the truth is: my mom tries over and over to convince me that her way is how it really went down and she tried to convince my boyfriend on this night. She tries to define me as that whatever-year-old who refuses to let go of something. In reality, I'm a 26-year-old woman who has let more things go than most people can imagine. She tells this story to everyone and tries to force them to define me by it, but it is not who I am, nor is it who I was, which is why memory is such a funny thing.