I recently took a trip to one of my favorite local bookstores (Talking Leaves) and picked up The Best American Essays of 2024 (Wesley Morris ed., 2024) (another recommendation from my mom—thanks, Mom!).
An Unsettling Argument
The collection includes an essay, Mere Belief (originally published in Harper’s Magazine), by Sallie Tisdale,1 on the ephemeral nature of memories—how they can, in essence, become corrupted and unreliable. I believe the author’s main point was to highlight the unique challenges for memoirists, whose livelihood depends on the ability to (accurately) write from memory. The more unsettling argument, though, is that we can’t be sure of who we are if “unreliable” memories are what shapes who we are.2 While I found the essay intriguing, I cannot agree.
I may not have a play-by-play of every memory from my past, but I certainly have had profound experiences that have left an indelible mark on my life. One such experience was being a teenaged mom.
A Trip Down Memory Lane
By the time I met my ex, my self-worth was practically non-existent, and, though I resented the many Black stereotypes that permeated the world around me, I became a poster child for those stereotypes when I got pregnant at fifteen.
I remember having a brief realization that my life was going to change forever—even if my teenage brain couldn’t possibly comprehend the significance of what that meant. I learned how to type at an alternative high school for pregnant girls in Brooklyn, NY. That school, full of pregnant girls, almost all of whom were Black and brown, was the first school experience in which I realized that I could accomplish things, that I was intelligent. I remember, too, the shame I felt when my father took me to a Sweet Sixteen party very pregnant and I saw the looks of pity from my peers, who were, presumably, looking forward to exciting lives that involved college dorm rooms and traveling abroad.
There are other memories from that time I’d rather not share. Suffice it to say that my story was not of the Hallmark-happy-ending variety; there was no magic wand that could give me what I needed to be a mother.
To my sons, especially my oldest, rather than a mother, I was more of a drill sergeant who drank copious amounts of coffee, smoked (about a pack a day), cursed like a sailor, and loved to argue about politics. I was definitively not a good mother, but I loved my sons, and I did my best.
A Reframe
Most of us do not remember the first time we burned our hand on a stove, yet that experience, whenever it happened and however it happened, informs who we are today. Perhaps it’s because an unblemished recollection was never the point. In other words, the benefit of our past experiences is how they shape who we become, not how accurately we remember them.
Likewise, I don’t remember all that I did or failed to do when I was a young mother. Because of that experience, however, I am able to recognize the opportunity to be a mother—to my sons and daughters—as the blessing it is.
- Other notable essays include Jenisha Watts’s Jenisha from Kentucky and Jonathan Gleason’s Proxemics. ↩︎
- I find this argument unsettling, even dangerous, because it seems to suggest that the inability to recall memories with the accuracy of a video recording calls into question the validity of our identity or sense of self. ↩︎
