Children who hit

[ailbhe]

My mother swears she was never hit by any of us after we were two.

But we can remember doing it. Not much, like, but hitting one's mother is a bit of a Big Deal and sticks in the guilt-ridden memory somewhat.

I wonder will my journals prevent me from rewriting the children's pasts? Or just alter how I rewrite them? I know other parents who swear they never smacked their children, with similar contradictory child-memories.

Comments

[rmc28]

I like to think my journals will help me remember ;) So I suppose the editing is in what I choose to write down and what gets left out.

Charles only started deliberately hitting me recently, as opposed to the random flails of babies and toddlers. This is deliberate hitting when very cross, and gets responded to by me telling him that was a horrid thing to do and then walking away and refusing to play with him until he calms down (or the next-best minimal-attention thing I can manage if out and about). I was quite charmed, though having to hide it, when a few weeks ago he told me furiously "I want to PUSH YOU OVER, I am VERY CROSS with you".

I haven't written about this anywhere really. Perhaps I should.

[webhill.livejournal.com]

parents make stuff up all the time.... michael's grandma has, for many years, been rewriting her daughter (my MIL)'s history. She does it to the grandkids, too ("remember the time I took you for your first milkshake?" "No, you never did that" "yes I did" etc). My own mom insists that i never came home from school to find the police there after she'd called them because I was missing, despite numerous eyewitness accounts to back me up. Parents are weird that way :)

[ailbhe]

My mother is unusually helpful in that she knows she has blank spots due to depression messing with her memory, so she doesn't *argue* with us over this stuff. But she is disconcerted by it.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

My mother's aggressive editing of the past nearly lead to me being prescribed psych drugs I didn't need. I'm a bit cranky about that.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

I know people who got through some bad childhood stuff by forgetting. For me, remembering is my survival skill - I had to remember things well, or my mother's rewritten version would be the canonical one even if it was something that happened to me that she wasn't even there for.

[submarine-bells.livejournal.com]

Human brains aren't tape recorders. Memories, by and large, tend to be pretty unreliable. Stuff gets forgotten, stuff gets remembered as reality that was actually fiction/stuff seen on tv/stuff thought about.... Memories do best, I think, remembering emotional impact, not factual stuff.

Which is a longhanded way of saying "sounds pretty normal to me". I mean, I grew up in a household where my mother rewrote reality to suit her prejudices/imagination/fears/wishes on a regular basis, so it happened a lot more to me than to many folk. But in general, memories aren't terribly reliable as records of the past. Sounds a bit counter-intuitive, but there it is.

[tiggsybabes.livejournal.com]

I've never smacked mine, partly as I disagree with it & partly as I've never felt the urge to do it.

My mother smacked me & my 2 brothers & my brothers were whacked with a sheepskin slipper by my mum & a belt by my dad.

I recall being slapped across the face by my mum when I was in my mid teens, she denies this!

[rmc28]

I'm well aware at times that I am "remembering the story I have told myself", especially if I am talking about things that happened in the two years after my son was born, when I was particularly sleep-deprived. I'm still mildly sleep-deprived and my memory is noticeably better now than it was then, but nowhere near as good as it was up to my mid-twenties.

Also I remember things we did before the baby and find myself thinking "but who was looking after Charles?" before remembering he didn't exist yet.

[wingedkami.livejournal.com]

My mum says I was never really interested in my tricycle. I distinctly remember enthusiastically riding around on it. I have no idea which of us is right.

[k425.livejournal.com]

hitting one's mother is a bit of a Big Deal and sticks in the guilt-ridden memory somewhat.

Exactly. Whereas there's a chance that for her it was more one of those things young children do so didn't stick in her mind. Or it wasn't what she counts as proper hitting so she doesn't remember it.

[kiya]

Ohgodsthis.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

Memory is pretty editable, really. There's a family story of an elderly uncle trying to give one of my brothers whiskey at a very tender age "because he sounded like he was having a bad time with the teething".

I am pretty sure I remember coming into the kitchen and hearing my mother explaining to him that no, whiskey was not suitable for babies. That would mean I was about 5-ish (can't remember anything from before about 4), so that would mean it was the youngest brother.

My father, however, is convinced it was me he was trying to give the whiskey to.

And another relative, since deceased, was pretty sure it was the middle brother, because he and the elderly uncle had a falling out soon after that.

There's also the possibility that it never happened at all, happened to one of my cousins, happened in a book or on TV, or the like, and it just got absorbed into family lore and repeated often enough that it has since become "fact".