Remembering Forward, Part II

I had memorized the floorboard creeks at Red Station (the name we gave to our house) from those countless hours of walking Caden back and forth, back and forth through the living room, into the open walk-in kitchen and back again. It wasn’t until some 9 months later that these acid reflux-induced-cry-soothing-exercises came back to me. I was doing the walk in the hopes of memorizing shorter catechism questions 3 and 4. Already the nostalgia tears at my heart.

I consider our move from this place and I’m tormented. I hate change. But its not so much the moving from this place as it is the memory of all that has taken place here. I have memorized my daughter’s life in little bits of 0’s and 1’s. My mind extracts first the memories that I have memorized from the videos that I have watched of her. The first fruits of my memory are tarnished and scratched by simulacra. My heart breaks at the impending celebration of her 4th birthday. What will it do at 14? 24? But then the pain would never be so deep if I hadn’t earned such great joy at knowing how wonderfully she is becoming her own person.

Sometimes she speaks with the matter of factness and confidence of an adult—about the simplest things—and it kills me. Eye brows raised, head straight ahead, gaze angled to the left, hands motioning meaningfully, “Yeah, maybe we could just color in my new coloring book when I get up tomorrow(!)” The exclamation point in her voice is almost optional—“I’m kinda excited about this, but I’m not gonna let on too much to that fact—because I’m 3 ½ years old now…”. Who teaches a 3 ½ year old how to be sublime?

So even as we move from this place to another, it will crush us to leave behind the cocoon in which so much of our past life gestated and formed into something beautiful. In that departure, I’m not sure what is more painful: the pain of leaving behind the place where our children have lived the entirety of their lives or the pain of knowing that we have already left behind little pieces of Maia and Caden’s past. And that—before we know it—they will be moving out from us in order to go into their own places in this world.