Lip Service

As a mother with three young children who look to me and their father for guidance on everything from getting dressed to knowing when it is safe to cross the street, I think about the lessons I’m imparting. I think about the details of our days. I think about the times I yell at them and shouldn’t have. Or how I could have answered a difficult question differently. I think about how much little stuff goes into creating memorable lives for them.

I want to create memories for my children. As parents, Sweetie and I have started traditions—of going to cut down the Christmas tree at the same farm every December and of attending the local parades, gathering candy thrown from the floats—hoping for a strong sense of family, community. Hoping for good memories. We have bedtime routines, developed for their comforting overtones. We provide our children with many of the toys they covet, and we build fairy houses with them in the back yard. But we don’t know what they will remember. We don’t know what will be a truly formative moment. We don’t know what will resonate. What will come back to them one day when they are dealing with the behaviors of their own children.

Many of you wanted to know the details of my lip story. And it is a story—a memory—that rings the loudest of any from my childhood. An accident with possible traumatic results remembered as a time of calm problem solving and my whole family together.

I was 10.
I remember sitting on the picnic table bench in our neighbor’s yard.
I remember kids running around.
I remember my neighbor—and crush—Saki Basdekis Kicking the Can (a rusty, 5-pound Maxwell House can taken from the garage).
I don’t remember the can hitting my lips, or standing up from the bench.
But I remember running through my backyard, into the house, through the kitchen and dining room and living room. Up the stairs and down the hall to my room, the farthest possible away. I don’t remember specifically why I ran. Fear? Pain? I didn’t know my lips were split into four pieces, but I knew something wasn’t right. I just had the instinct to run home.
I remember lying face down on my blue comforter.
I remember my mother following me up the stairs. Running.
I remember my father’s voice. Alarm.
I remember that it was a Sunday.
I remember being told we needed to go to the hospital, though I don’t remember specific words.
I remember standing in the hall outside of the bathroom and my mom handing me a clean washcloth soaked in saline solution.
I remember noticing that she had opened a new bottle of saline.
I remember driving to the hospital, and then to a second hospital, because my mother insisted on a plastic surgeon.
I remember waiting for the surgeon.
I remember the shirt he wore. That he had been chopping firewood.
I remember the days between being stitched up and when the stitches were removed—consuming as many calories as I could—all through a straw.
And I remember not being able to correctly pronounce my best friend’s name (I said it “Veth,” not “Beth.”)
I remember getting the stitches out. Dad talking to the doctor. How special it was that he was the one to take me. To take a day off work.
I remember fainting just before we were to leave. The doctor catching me. Putting me back on a gurney.

I remember so many details of that day. And of the days following.
I don’t remember details from that year decorating the Christmas tree. In fact, I don’t ever remember decorating the Christmas tree during the five or so years we lived in that house. (But I do remember, one year, standing at the piano on Christmas Day, singing carols. And that Santa brought me the teddy bear I had my heart set on. I knew I was too old to want a teddy bear. But Santa understood.)

My parents did not do anything purposefully to make sure I remembered that day my lips were—in the span of a few hours—decimated and reconstructed. Indeed, my mother insisted on the plastic surgeon—causing us to drive to a better hospital farther away—precisely so that I would not have to relieve the results of such an accident every day for the rest of my life. And yet, this day of my childhood is one of the most vivid.

Since I’ve been a mother, we have not had a day like that yet. And I hope we don’t, of course. But I am struck by the power of my own fully formed memory. Of all it holds within and represents of me. My brother and sister sitting silently by my side in the backseat of the car. The family together during a day of complete uncertainty. We were, quite literally, all in it together. I’m sure my parents could have asked the neighbors to watch Justin and Sarah. Instinct told them not to, I’m guessing. Or the urgency of time didn’t permit. And I’m glad.

My mother and I have spoken of the day my lips were taken. But I’ve never asked Justin or Sarah what they remember. It is so much my memory. I wonder how the details they remember would add to or change my own memory of that day.

And that is the crux of this control we don’t have over our children. We do the best we can to teach them what is right, to put the weight where we want it to be—on the special occasions, the moments of unexpected achievement. And yet, we cannot control what will stick. We just have to hope that we do a good enough job that in the end our kids will someday thank us for a memorable childhood and all that it took to make it so.

Tagged as: creating memories, when we were just sisters