Reminiscence Bump

'The reminiscence bump is the tendency for older adults to have increased recollection for events that occurred during their adolescence and early adulthood. Individuals can generally recall a disproportionate number of autobiographical memories from this period.

The reminiscence bump occurs between the ages of 10 and 30 years old where memory storage increases during times of change in self and in life goals.'

Taken from the great and glorious, occasionally dubious (hopefully not in this instance) Wiki P.


I seemed to experience the downward slope of this bump in my early twenties. I can remember sitting in a university kitchen, during the cold, clear light of the early hours of an English morning, birds calling through the crisp grey, discussing earnestly (and, admittedly, drunkenly) that I didn't feel things as keenly these days. That my emotions were muted, that my memories of more recent times were blurry, that my heart no longer felt as though it would split my ribs apart when the music played. I bemoaned my progress over the reminiscence bump and wailed that everything from this point forward would be lost in a fog of ageing and meaninglessness. And yes, yes . . . I was (am) fairly insufferable.

My voice caught a little as I quoted Antoine de Saint-Exupery. In a replica of the wobbly voice I used to listen to on a stretched cassette tape of the 1980s.

'So I fumble along as best I can, now good, now bad, and I hope generally fair-to-middling.
In certain more important details I shall make mistakes, also. But that is something that will not be my fault. . . . . Perhaps I am a little like the grown-ups. I have had to grow old.'

Because I thought I was a grown up.
Bwah ha ha ha.
Oh dear.
Poor, drunken, stupid, young me.

***

I've been thinking a great deal about Merry's recent post here. The legacy.

I think that the door that links my life in the here and now of 2012 to my life in August to December 2008 is permanently ajar. It is never entirely shut. But it is never fully open either. I peer around. I take a quick look and then I run away. But I keep going back. To take another peep. Just in case something pops back in, another memory of her perhaps?

The recollections of my own, brief and brutal reminiscence bump are full of holes where some sort of peculiar shut down occurred, things that I probably don't actually want to remember have been replaced by an absolute blank. And those months have been revisited so very often that I know I have decorated them, that I undoubtedly hidden bits from myself, that I have embellished and embroidered and lied and deceived. Unintentionally. The delusions of the defeated.

I could tell you a few things for sure.

The pattern of the mural on the wall on the back corridor of an infrequently used exit from the NICU, the handwriting on the call button for Jessica's ward, the curl of the hook of the coat stand, the smell of the parents' shower room, the tone of the voices of the women who worked next door, the skin of the consultant doctor.

And so I am haunted by randomness, by these disconnected images that ping about in my brain, when nothing else occupies it. This is why I try so desperately to cram it full of . . . anything going. I'm on season four of nineteen of America's Next Top Model. Oh yes.

But when Tyra and the girls are gone.
They sneak back in.
These small certainties, the pattern on the incubator cover, the scent of the hospital canteen.
I know this much is true.
And the rest?
It's anybody's guess.

***

The birth of my daughters seemed to rip all my memories away and cast them adrift. The past and the future. And I find myself marooned on a small stretch of time. Where I can't seem to connect with my own past and everything since seems a little like a dream.

I look back to the young woman that I once was. The woman who wanted her ribs to split open with music. Little did she know it would take more than that. And that you can walk around with your ribs splayed and nobody will even notice. Melodramatic sigh.

And those memories. Those treasured memories of the reminiscence bump that the majority find so accessible and vivid. Mine? They don't feel as though they are anything to do with me. Bump schump.

I know that I decided this and that. Read this book. Loved that man. Thought I had this friend for the rest of my life. Believed I stood for this or for that. Learnt these facts. Indubitably I did. I have some pieces of paper that state that I must have known something, at some point. Someone who looks a lot like me, sounds a lot like me, DID do those things and reach those conclusions.

But that person who I had so carefully spent twenty nine years constructing looks like a ghost. I look at her and think, 'hmmm facile much? Think about things much? Idiot much?'

And now I am almost scared to attempt to make a start on another persona. Because it just seems like an utter waste of time when I'll be tearing her down, burning her to the ground in another thirty years or so. And then I may only have one more shot left. If I'm lucky. So I'm scared to even try.

Wary of being faced down by sixty year old me. Sneering 'Idiot much?'

But, like it or not, wanting to or not, a new person is emerging from the ruins of me aged twenty nine and one quarter.

Perhaps Jill A. overestimated me when we talked about returning to a second adolescence? Perhaps I overestimated myself?

I guess that I am now, effectively, four years old. Having being reborn at roughly the same time as my daughters. On either the 26th, or the 29th, of August. I'm never sure if we all arrived together or if I re-struggled into the world as Georgina left it.

No wonder Jessica and get along so well and disagree so violently at times. We both want to play on the iPad, we both want to be feed and comforted and warmed. We are both learning, or re-learning, the laws of social interaction. Don't bite. Don't shout. Don't say what you really think.

We both don't quite know what we are doing.  Not yet.

Sorry Jessica. You didn't get a twin but, hey, here's your mother. The secret toddler. Trying to coax herself into some kind of coherent adult format. Filling in for Georgina.

Who seems to have got it right first time.

***

And memories of afterwards seem strange too.

Perhaps it because I am older?
Perhaps it is because I am a mother?

It all seems to rush past and I'm still baffled. The children sprout and stretch, like a fast motion film of plant growth in a nature documentary. I seem to stagnate but I know that can't really be the case. It's just a terribly slow kind of growth, even in fast motion. Achingly slow.

The years slither past and I'm still by the doorway, peering back to that place that seems to have changed everything.

The book I've just finished reading had a recurring theme.
"You just don't get it do you Tony?"
In this instance, I'm with Tony.

Because I just don't get it. The book. Or anything else much.
Perhaps that is the point?
That there isn't anything too get.
Because life isn't like a novel.
It's messy and incomplete and inane.
Full of things like eating breakfast and long, long stretches of boredom.
And mysterious things like babies who die and accidental injuries and relationships that disappear.
Events whose echoes seem to hang in the ether long after the breakfasts and boredom have gone.
Those things that lurk behind doors that never quite seem to be entirely shut.

I open up the hard drive of my old computer. And there's this photograph. Of my mother, me and Jessica. This time that seems to have shaken up everything and everyone and every single fact that I so foolishly thought that I understood. Sent me spinning backwards.

Through the permanently ajar door.