Memories help form who we are. Experiences bring us to today, and help shape tomorrow. When we look back, we remember feelings, and images, if not details of childhood. Lines get blurred and sometimes come out fuzzy. My husband and his brother were born, and lived in England for about ten years before the family emigrated to Canada. 🇬🇧🇨🇦 Both have their memories about growing up, just like everyone else. It is clear that feelings associated with moving here, growing up in an immigrant household, and bearing the brunt of family dynamics we have no control over can take their toll. Each of us has a personal story about how we grew up.☝🏽 Siblings in the same family can have entirely different outlooks, when remembering the past. Perspective is everything.
As adults, we have a say in how we live. That often unequal relationship of our childhood homes is gone. We make our own decisions, live how WE want, and answer to ourselves, so to speak. In many families, while the reach of the parental hand is long, it’s up to the next generation to break out in autonomy, or not.
My brother-in-law has an almost compulsive fascination with filmmaking, the horror genre, science fiction, and of course Star Wars.📽 From a young age, he fell in love with movies, and the imaginative escape they offer. Memories of films move with you, country to country, decade to decade -- wherever we are, we can take our film experiences and feelings with us. 🌍 And no matter what is happening around us, those films are an escape. A therapy. 🙏🏽
We don’t always question nor think about why we love what we love. We just do. But what makes one brother obsessed with Bobofet -- complete with a $300 replica helmet, a (fairly large) shoulder tattoo, and a collection of unlimited toys — and the other more tempered in his love of film? The former, so much so that he becomes frantic over ‘Mandalorian’ spoilers, knows innumerable Stanley Kubrik fun facts, and dreams in horror?
It is easy to look back and count the flaws in our upbringing. We don’t always remember nor understand the difficulties our parents faced. Resentment can build, and we paint pictures in our head of what life was like growing up. 🎨 Some of them bang on, others maybe not. We find faults. What one could perceive as a lovely childhood, another could say was distorted with guilt and lack of love. 🤷🏻♀️
Well this month, my brother-in-law found an unidentified cardboard box, deep in the basement of his parents' home. 📦 He opened it to uncover a vault of past treasures that were both his, and his brother’s. Toy cars, action figures, puzzles, and the like. A minefield of memories he assumed no longer existed in the move to Canada. The assumption being they were tossed out 40 years ago, which fits with a certain narrative about a childhood lacking in certain areas. Which begs the question: do ‘regular’ toys from the 70s imply a ‘regular’ childhood? 🤔
Can resentment and trauma from our past be exaggerated over time? Disproportionated blurring? Maybe things weren’t as bad as one might think?
Certainly not easy questions to answer.
But where one brother couldn’t get out of bed after going through the box of toys, covered in an emotional avalanche of memories, the other found these artifacts sweet and nostalgic, eager to share them with his own children. One’s warm walk down his memory lane, is another’s cause for a reevaluation of his entire bank of childhood impressions and beliefs. Perhaps that inner child, that “little you” -- full of wonder and innocence -- did not have ALL needs met. Does any child? Are we, as adults, continually carrying our younger self — and all we lacked — inside us?
And is it possible that we push memories away, the ones that do not coincide with our current feelings and judgement?
Over time, as we age, we mellow — and hopefully exhale, letting go of what is making us hold our breath. We tend to our inner child. And that, is a marvellous thing that comes with time. And experience.
And cardboard boxes we find in the basement. 📦
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