I get it now - childhood memories

Hello Everyone,

The expectations for the series finale of M*A*S*H were very, very high. The show was incredibly popular, and it had built a reputation for dealing with serious topics while being very funny. With an unprecedented share of the American (and Canadian) population tuning in, they pulled off one of the greatest episodes in television history. A feature of the episode centers on the lead character remembering something from his past. What begins as a fun and happy memory gets progressively darker as he works through the layers of his memory. Over the course of the episode, it’s revealed that his mind has, in fact, covered up a tragedy. The closer he gets to the real memory, the more the impact of what really happened hits him.

I feel like I have gone through something similar with a memory of my own. When I was about three years old, I wandered off our farm and was gone for about an hour before my parents found me. Throughout my childhood and into adolescence, I remember this story being told as a funny example of me, the dawdling, spacey kid wandering off from home. That’s not ideal, but I was found safe and all’s well that ends well. As the years have progressed, every time I revisited the story, it lost some of the lighthearted elements to it. Yep, I was a pokey, dawdling, spacey kid, but not knowing where your child is for an hour is pretty scary.

The transformation of the telling of the story is a result of the transformation of my own mind. In the beginning, it was a fun story because I could only see it from the perspective of my three-year-old self. My memory is that I saw my dad get on his motorcycle and head over to the neighbouring farmhouse where my grandparents lived. I decided to follow him there, not realizing that a pokey kid would not be able to keep up with a walking adult, let alone one on a motorcycle. I got to the other farm, didn’t see anyone, so I turned around and walked home. The end.

As I’ve grown up, I’ve slowly been able to realize that from my parents’ perspective, this story is very, very different. One minute, their kid is out playing in the yard, and another minute, he’s gone. Not gone for a walk to the next farm over. Just gone. My three-year-old mind couldn’t conceive that my parents had a different perspective and didn’t know where I was. But my 44 year-old mind can very much see that. I also now know that with only two adults, no close neighbours, and two other young kids to look after, my parents couldn’t look everywhere at once. There was a pond, there was farm machinery, there was all manner of danger that my three-year-old self, and my initial memories, couldn’t see.

But I get it now. With a kid of my own, I can begin to understand the real story of that incident. It wasn’t a jaunty little walk for a tyke. It was a terrifying, hellish, interminable hour that ticked by, second by second, as my parents didn’t know where I was, and didn’t know if something had happened to me.

I recently compared parenting to gardening, but this is where that comparison breaks down. Gardening doesn’t leave scars.

Wes

Photos

Arthur being a goof in the sunshine.

A poppy from the garden.