These Are the Greatest Days

I was talking with a rather remarkable woman recently. Every day of her son's life she has written something about him, usually something that he did that day. He is seventeen years old.

As she was describing her process--writing small notes and vignettes, longhand, in journal after journal--I tried to imagine the simplicity and complexity of seventeen years. Not the life itself, but the process of chronicling it. What treasures she must find when she revisits simple moments long resigned to the recesses of memory: a school play here, a forgotten friend there, fragments of a life remembered one way but perhaps recorded differently.

I felt sheepish when I told her that I blogged every few weeks. I lack the discipline (I won't blame time--time is always there for the disciplined) to record daily events, and to be honest, I think I need to observe things over a period of time before I have anything of even mild interest to say. The daily routine is seldom interesting.

When Andres was born we started a daily journal to record his vital statistics: eating, sleeping, diapers. I say "we" but it was really Natalia--I didn't have as much interest in recording all this information, and figured that the day would never come when I wanted in-depth records about how many times he ate, or when he slept, or how many diapers he went through on a given day. She kept it up though, and for most of Andres' first year we have the running story of his life, recorded in biorhythms.

On most pages she also recorded what she and Andres had done that day, what kind of a mood he was in, who they had seen. Small moments; nothing overly spectacular.

Looking back now, I wish I hadn't been so dismissive of this daily journaling. How interesting would it be to be able to read through your child's life, day by day? To relive the daily slog page by page? To read chapters written long ago, the details of a lived life providing the latticework for lost memories to linger on, however briefly, before again receding.

We journaled again when Celia was born but we were less focused than we had been with Andres. We certainly had less time when she was an infant, and we derived a certain amount of comfort since Andres had escaped his first year relatively unscathed. And once I began blogging (when she was about 4 months old) I was certainly less inclined to record the day to day.

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When I tell other parents that I am the proud father of a 2-year old and a 4-year old, the most common reaction is "Enjoy this age--these are the greatest days of your life." I have no doubt that they are telling the truth. But I wonder if their own recollections of toddlerhood are tainted (influenced?) by the experiences of emerging adulthood, seeing their children age from mere babes into pre-teens and then full-teens.

These are great days in an abstract sense. 2 is an age of independence, and 4 is an age of personality; there are few dull moments, and at the end of the day both kids go to bed happy. (Most of the time.) But not every day is great by any stretch. Today, for instance, neither Andres nor Celia wanted to change out of their PJs, so most of my morning was wasted on trying to get them into clothes. By 9 am I was already in a terrible mood. And then Celia threw a fit on the way home: 10 minutes of screaming "I want mama! I want mama!" I could do without that. There are many days like this.

And even the good moments are often just that--good, nothing spectacular, ordinary moments in a day. Celia, Andres and I all played trains when we got home today--20 minutes of building a track around the room, only about 10% of the time spent arguing. It was fun. I'm sure, at some point down the road when Celia is a (gulp) teenager and Andres is in (gulp) college, I will remember these moments with Rockwellian nostalgia--The Greatest Days, The Days of Playing Trains. I'll probably recall it like this: "I remember we would build elaborate train sets in your room, spending hours on end building and playing with them. For months that's all we did."

But today, experiencing it as it was happening, it was just another afternoon: killing time with the kids before dinner, my mind wandering from them to laundry to food to work. Soon we moved from trains to LEGOs, and then on to dinner. The immediate greatness of this time is lost within routine.

I think this is one of the chief reasons why I blog--so that when I look back on these records months or years from now, I recall them with more detail and truth that I am bound to remember them with. I am terrified that one day I will look at Andres and Celia and forget how they got to be so big, so different than what they once were. Change happens slowly, but recent events always seem to color perceptions of the not-so-distant past. This blog is an effort to record them as they are, tantrums and all, a full patchwork quilt of small individual squares.

In thinking about my conversation with Ruth--the woman who I wrote about at the top of this post--I began to wonder what she got out of all her journaling. Was she less nostalgic than other parents, since she could relive her child's youth almost any time she wanted? Did she remember these days differently, aided by her running commentary? Or did she even read through them? Perhaps the writing, not the reading, is the reward; the ultimate joy being that these daily, routine events are there to be recorded at all.