I wonder if scrapbooking has lessened due to the advent of social media and all it’s myriad of tools to catalog one’s daily lives. Has Flickr replaced photo albums? Do digital images remain forever on our high-tech cameras and hard drives with the promise to be printed? Do people still buy bound journals when typing is faster and oftentimes more coherent at capturing our thoughts than putting pen to paper? I know I have only completed one notebook journal in all my life. Doogie Howser, how far we have come.
Technology is moving at a rapid whip-lash speed. Will the world be recognizable to me 20 years from now? How will my children fare? I know the world I grew up in is unrecognizable to my children already. The Jetsons, come meet your new neighbors.
I wonder what of my children’s childhood will they remember? What will they forget or rewrite through time’s fuzzy vision? I wonder if the moments I tag as important for them will even register 20-30 years from now? How can I ensure the accuracy of their remembrances? Will the time I lost my temper and disallowed my son from playing with an electronic toy be a bad memory or one that he will recognize as necessary parental discipline? I hope the latter as I meant the latter. But what we mean and what becomes are much different things. I doubt my own parents would ever have foreseen how I now see my childhood to be. This is all new territory for me and the hubby. We each did not have -that- pleasant of childhoods to begin with. He got off better than I did, for sure. It feels so so bizarre how vastly different mine is to my children’s. Despite my firm belief that I am doing right by them, most of the time I still feel terrified at flying blind. I can’t model my parenting skills after what I witnessed firsthand. No, that would not do. Emotional, mental, physical abuse is definitely not to be recreated in this generation that I am raising. So how to teach without the methods my father used? How to show love without the manipulation and guilt-laying my mother did? How to address property rights when I had none growing up? I don’t have models for appropriate parenting. I’m flying blind and it is terrifying and it’s all I’ve got. I’m thankful for having the courage for my children’s sake to do it anyways.
As I worry about the future and our ever-changing plans, I keep falling down the rabbit-hole of past memories. Flashbacks assault me throughout the day. Not just images, but actual sensations that I had in those moments when I had them. The time period changes–they come and go in phases. Right now I’m being haunted by my high school years when I’m awake and at night I relive my 20’s. Then I snap back to the present in my 30’s. The inevitable happens and I pick up a childhood relic of mine and instantly I’m transported to sitting on my Daddy’s lap playing computer games as he tells me how proud he is of me. Love love that memory. A picture of Robie Sr. is the background on my iPhone. On my desk lies the 4 1980’s Sierra Adventure Games DH got me for Christmas. Too sensitive just yet to be installed by me. On my living room bookshelf sits my Dad’s old Glass Electricity Globe Light thing. I wonder if it still works or will it explode after it is turned on for more than an hour? It would suck to be electricuted by something that is 25 years old. Is this because New Year’s is looming its head around the corner? Is this because I still so fully, wholly, and painfully miss my Dad? Is this because I’ve recently found some old friends, faces from the past that I came upon on facebook and google? Or just because I’m between being rooted and being lost? I think all of it. Why not? When has life ever been simple? I’m hopeful for the future no matter how painful the past nor how uncertain the present. I’m grateful for that.
Precious Happy 