Lydia Guaraldi Fash
During birthing, I forgot myself, becoming someone not grounded in thoughts, but something fully immersed in body. I no longer spoke, for I was far from words. I remember the feeling of a contraction: a wave that ramped up, up, binding tighter, tighter so that all I could do was exit out of time, exit out of memory, out of self. I was there—so painfully there—but also not there. My eyes were closed and the room blurred. There were no walls, no ceiling, only the stomach-turning take-out smell lingering in my husband’s hair. (He’d changed his shirt at my queasy request.) There was the feeling of the midwife’s hand on my leg—a hand not connected to a person, a leg barely connected to me. There was a voice from the room, directing me to lower my shrieks to groans, to force the animal sounds down into my belly. Then the pushing and the crowning: a feeling of tearing, of fire—so hot, so sharp—that it was the all. I was splitting in half, ripping, ripping, and burning in a circle of white pain.
In that moment of exhausted non-self, I remembered a snatch of Johnny Cash. Burning ring of fire, burning ring of fire. Push, pain, splitting, splitting, push, ring of fire, ring of fire, fire, push, splitting, fire, fire. The words were feeling, were pain.
A few days later, when asked how the birth had been, I shook my head, clutching my baby. I couldn’t answer. To face the memory was to look at the sun, so bright that it obliterated me.
My friend Ruthann, a cognitive psychologist who specializes in memory, says, “Memory is adaptive. We don’t want to remember everything.” But what a drag it is to misplace my wallet, to forget to print a worksheet for my students, to realize what I meant to buy at the grocery store only when unpacking the groceries after my trip. There are times when I would like to remember everything. To be able to recall, with perfect fidelity, my son saying his first word or the last time he nursed.
Some people do remember everything: those few with hyperthymesia. It’s rare—under 100 people have it—but these folks remember the events of any past day. Give them a date, and they know where they were and which mundane things happened. July 1, 1985: ate celery and went to Janey’s house to play. December 12, 1989: heard Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” on the radio. June 11, 2000: purchased Mrs. Dalloway. Such superior autobiographical memory means they remember the exact throb of each broken bone. They still feel the full agony of every heartache. For them, even decades after giving birth, the ring of fire remains forever burning, forever splitting them in half. Memory becomes a curse.
Although I knew that I wanted another child, it took me a year and a half to be able to think about enduring the process again. I needed time for the experience to blur. I needed time to believe what another mother had told me—that I would one day sit on a bicycle seat again. “Forgetting is a feature not a bug,” Ruthann says. We must forget to move on from the past, and I am grateful to no longer feel the birthing pains. I am grateful to forget the devastation of earlier failures. I am grateful to discard so many junk-mail memories—the hours spent lurching stop-start on a public bus, waiting for the doctor, scrubbing the bathtub.
And, yet, I worry as I watch my mother forget more and more. I worry that one day she will move beyond not recalling where the dishes go to not knowing who I am, who my sons are. Are we not fragile creatures, made of a million moments strung together with fishing line? When they placed my son in my arms for the first time, a beautiful familiar-stranger, and I felt that avalanche of raw love. When I met my second son newly outside the belly, and although I had fretted I would not, I loved him just as fiercely, just as immediately, as I had my first. Could I ever forget this love I have for them? Could my mother forget her love for me?
We must forget to live, but I know I will not be me if I forget what matters. My mother will not be my same mother if she no longer knows me. This ring of burning thoughts—that I cannot control my own mind and how disease and forgetting may attack and alter it—makes me fear.
I wish I could discard that worry. Instead, I do my best to ignore it by humming a snatch of Johnny Cash, hugging my kids tightly, and searching for wherever I left the car keys.
Lydia Guaraldi Fash
After about a decade at the college level, Lydia G. Fash abandoned tertiary education to teach high school English. With that shift, she moved from publishing literary criticism with academic presses to penning prose that people might actually want to read. In addition to crafting nonfiction essays, she’s revising a comic novel about a dysfunctional university English department.