September 24, 2020 started a 40-day countdown to my 40th birthday.
Since I couldn’t travel to Ireland (½ of my ancestral homeland) as originally planned, I’ve committed to reflect on a year of my life per day for each of the 40 days. Today takes me through Year 3.
Daily-ish reflections may be found on Facebook or on the new 40 Years of Wondering page of this website.
I have a tendency to think about my early childhood the way I think about the French and Indian War. I’m vaguely aware that it happened and can identify the main talking points but I don’t have the context necessary to speak intelligently on the matter.
Indeed, I’ll immediately backtrack if pressed on any point. If you sound like you know what you’re talking about, I’ll believe you since I clearly don’t.
After all, who actually cares about the French and Indian War? It’s just something other people did that directly impacted the young colonists’ lives while nearly crushing them with debt – just like most childhoods!
It is after the colonists stand up on their own two feet and proclaim their values that I start paying attention. And so it’s been with my life.
I hardly ever think about my first few years. Mostly because I have no memories of them but also because they just didn’t seem that interesting.
Until I had my daughter.
Then, I started thinking about them more but still just focused on the few things I knew to be true: I was born the day before Ronald Reagan was elected President. My parents divorced when I was very young. Mom brought a demon cat into the house to terrorize our family.
But those early years mattered – a lot. Early childhood is the most important part of your life that you’ll never remember.
Mom kept a baby book describing a bit about my life and personality through my first three years of life. I read it this week for the first time in a long time.
The book is extremely sweet and thoughtful, though creepy at times.
I could do without knowing how well human hair and teeth preserve inside of paper envelopes.
But it’s nice to have a record of what I was like and how it made Mom feel even though it reads a bit like she’s writing with a future audience (of me) in mind.
There are worse problems to have than a long-deceased mother trying to raise your confidence from beyond the grave.
It’s been a long time since someone other than me wrote about how perfect and sweet and lovable I am!
I’m especially glad Mom kept the book because my daughter’s birth raised a lot of questions about my earliest years and she’s no longer here to answer them.
Instead, she participates through her book. As I read parts out loud to my wife Jenny, she kept laughing and saying, “sounds familiar” to passages about sleeping in late, singing to myself, or stealing other people’s food if it’s left near me.
I thought she was laughing at how I haven’t changed since I was a baby, but she was laughing at how similar our daughter is to the baby Mom describes – me at that age.
What a special moment to have my mother’s love for me as a baby overlap with my wife’s love for our baby – even if only for a few pages.
In addition to reading the baby book, I’ve also been flipping through all of the old family photo albums.
The weird thing about looking at pictures of your own early childhood is that everything impacted the person you are now, but the person you are now doesn’t recognize any of it.
Take Owen, for example. He’s the guy sitting next to me and my brothers on Christmas morning, 1984. He was Mom’s first boyfriend after the divorce.
Owen must’ve had a pretty big presence in my life when I was 3 if he’s sitting with us on Christmas less than two months after I turned 4. But I only know it’s Owen because his name is written on the picture’s back.
I know OF Owen, but I wouldn’t have recognized him in any way without the context.
Confession time: the Maury Povichiest thing about my life is the following sentence: “Mom’s boyfriend was Dad’s girlfriend’s ex-husband.”
Nothing about that entirely true sentence is healthy, but here we are kneeling in front of a Christmas tree pretending that it’s fine.
Happily, they’re all non-memories to me now existing only as an interesting factoid to wonder about years later or to use as the punchline to a Jeff Foxworthy “Might be a redneck” joke.
I can tell you stories about at least three of the ornaments pictured behind Owen but nothing more about him.
The lasting memories are the things we built upon.
The healthy relationships my parents ensured my brothers and I shared with each of them.
The sibling relationships that went from my brothers adoring me for my first year to me chasing after them in my second year and continues for a lifetime of twists of turns.
The only thing I can definitely tell you about The French and Indian War is that it was the training ground for young George Washington to stumble and right himself before going on to become the person we all recognize today. The same can be said of my early childhood.
We all start somewhere.
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