She crawls into my lap and asks, “Tell me about when you were little.”
And I reply, “I used to only play with trucks and blocks, never dolls. I used to love to eat the jellied top off tinned ham and watch grilled cheese cook in our old stove on the far wall of the kitchen where I grew up. I hung out at the local racetrack with my bike and rode the hills cut into the paddocks made by other budding BMX-ers.”
She tugs on my shirt and asks, “Now tell me about when daddy was little.”
“Your daddy’s family owns a supermarket in the town where he grew up and he used to get up to lots of adventures, and naughtiness, with his older brothers (and Lee!). He barely spoke a word until he was about three, but they knew he could’ve if he wanted. He was just being obstinate.”
She puts her lips to my ears, “And what about Riley?”
“Your brother was born on a Friday afternoon, long after he was due, so your Nanny only barely got to meet him before she had to catch her flight home again the following day. You were the first person your brother smiled at; he clearly picked you from the start as kin.”
She smiles, coming to her favourite part. “What about when I was a baby?”
The first time I got this question, I stalled. I thought. I was mortified at the length of time it took to conjure up the memories. Was time wiping it clean? I could easily remember the day her brother was born, why not hers? I panicked, and panic returned an answer.
“You were born on a Thursday because ‘Thursday’s child is full of grace.’ You slept in a pram for your first four months because I could easily rock you to sleep in that and I was too scared to try any other method.”
There are other memories packed away, mind. I give the impression otherwise here, but actually the first nine months or so of K’s life were heavily chronicled in a diary I kept in 2004; the details of which may, one day, be turned into a book. That was part of their original purpose, but it seems, I fear, that they need to be revisited.
How can it be that this ‘Big Four Girl’ – as we call her now – is now old enough to demand her past be summoned and celebrated? And how can it be that my memory has gone spotty at the worst possible time? All in the same week when I walked past a photo of hers taken at 20 months of age and I stopped dead, gazing at that photo I hadn’t looked at in a while and I wondered, “Where has that little baby gone?”
She is gone, but then she is not. She is inside and of the delicious creature who is now, as I write this, asleep in her bed.
I suppose this is why I blog: to take the fight of what is done and not leave it ‘done’. The past, whether we dwell on it, or our children ask us to, always abides somewhere.
For me, it’s in a drawer in one of my work filing cabinets.
Perhaps its time to dig it out again.
For her.
