Re-membering
What do you associate with the word remember? Perhaps memory, nostalgia, recalling from the old rolodex file of high school textbook facts required for the big tests or maybe the way your grandmother’s house smells for the faintest second before the nose blindness creeps in and you are there now oblivious to the must and dust collecting in her oddities cabinet.
To remember is an act of putting the lost, forgotten, stowed away, past into the present. Pulling the china doll off the shelf and placing her in front of you as if you were a child once again. This theme of memory, of remembering, has weaved itself into the platitudes of my day. In books, podcasts, in conversations with students, to remember is tugging my skirt like a child’s hand clenched tightly round my hemline pulling me into her reality. The word plucks at some distant feeling I can’t quite trace. The thread is old and thin, stitch steps missing where the threading has caught and ripped from the fabric; ghostly needle point.
I have been re-tracing this line for years wrapping the frayed ends into clean seams. At first, this practice was about eradicating the external people, places, practices, work that didn’t align with the ideal of the life I wished to lead. I knew I wasn’t happy. That I was absorbed in relationships that made me feel stiff and alien to myself. I absolved to relinquish everything that made me feel uncertain about me.
The more I pushed down this path, the more I attempted to find joy through the external. My life started to transform. I found myself involved in new dreamy landscapes. Ones where for the first time, I worked on fulfilling projects, had friends who I stayed up late with, laughed with. I went on dates. I ran miles on the weekends and started to lose weight. But of course, the external only changed my life so much.
Leaving all the pieces of my life scattered across all the places I was leaving didn’t fix all of it. Memories coursed through my mind and the years of abuse played merry didry doo in the background. This nagged at me, trying to make me remember.
Yet, it is not memory I wish to recall or a song who’s melody is trying to flavor my tongue with her music. It is something about me, some crystalline piece of myself I faintly recall washing ashore at my feet. My eyes catching the smoothed surface - now chaffed and shaped by time in salt, surf, and tide. A washing that has forever altered a shape that fits (or used to fit) in me as me.
I am in the middle of What My Bones Know A Memoir of Healing from Complex-Trauma by Stephanie Foo. This book, this author - her anger, her rage, her intensity, her desire to be good and to be loved - has rung the tuning-fork in my skull and returned to me memories I have forgotten I lost.
I pick up this piece of myself, sea glass now, smooth and supple. Something beautiful I could hold in my palm as deep as my fingertips can push into a bruise. It lays there bobbing along the surface of my hand like a booy on water. Not in, not out, not of, but part.
I finger the pieces of myself as a student and I walk the halls of the old house where they started school. The house is hot, fabricated in the 1920’s for a rich family with old stone corridors behind big curved doors and curlicues of old ideals spring from the fireplace carvings and baseboards.
They tenderly walk the old wooden staircases that lead to the pre-school classes on the second floor, wandering past old projects and art narrating to me their memory. This is where my sibling made a net! This is where I went to class and I met Tif! Here’s a picture of me in the forest and one of me playing! I can tell that a sadness aches at their heart, that each memory only makes them want to retract into the memories. To return.
In the bible, Jesus is quoted as saying “you have to be perfect like our father in heaven is perfect.” But when this is translated from Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, the translation reads as, “You have to be whole. The way our lord in heaven is whole.” Like me, a piece of themselves is missing from the now, as though a fragment of tile cracked years ago, if found and replaced, could return the elements of life this child so deeply yearns for. As if the experience of being themselves then could make certain who they are now, could make certain they will be remembered this way. My throat catches and I mourn with them, silently - cautiously - so they do not suspect pity and at best indifference.
How do I remember me? What will hold my memory? I ask myself on my way home. A school, a blog, a person, a tiktok, a home, my dog? What puzzle pieces of my whole self lay trapped in the mosaic of all the places and people I have touched throughout my life?
Working with children makes the threads of ideas curious and inescapable. Like their words, their questions, their ideas, their eyes so full of wonder about the vastness of the world opens up my own portal of wonder, pulls the covers off my neatly tucked bed that makes the world around me seem so certain, sure, and so.
In a recent podcast episode from We Can Do Hard Things, Jane Fonda talks about her experience of remembering. The opening question Glennon Doyle poses to Jane is this:
“Your mom died by suicide when you were twelve, and you say that at the moment you found out your mom died you left your body and you didn’t come back for fifty years. Can you talk to us about what you mean when you talk about disembodiment?”
In response, Jane, in short takes us on the journey of remembering herself. Not as remembering to recall but remembering as to put back together, to become whole.
Jane does this by describing the effect childhood sexual abuse took coupled with the loss of her mother. Like a double image, all her interesting and fascinating things about herself left and went next door while she presented herself as the “good girl.”
I, too, have a double image. A girl next door, and next door, and next door I can’t quite reach. “In Chinese the word for endurance is the symbol for knife written next to the symbol for heart (knife-heart). To walk with a knife in the heart.” says Stephanie Foo in her book What My Bones Know. The consequences of what our parents endured pump through our veins. Our own resiliency keeps us going. However, not all of us do well in life despite our abilities to endure, to walk around with knives in our hearts.
If to re-member is to make whole then do I need to remove the knives that I walk with that split my heart in two?
Fast forward to January 2nd, 2000 Jane separates from her husband and calls her daughter (who is staying in Paris) and asks if she can stay at her house. She is standing in her daughter’s house with her golden retriver and says to the hosts of the show, Glennon and Abby, “there was such silence and I could feel myself moving back into myself and I said this is God!”
I am not experiencing such silence or a break-up as Jane describes but I am trying to re-member myself. I am trying to put back together my body parts, the members of my consciousness both known and unknown, I am trying to restitch my memories into a whole self.
When we are remaking ourselves, over and over again, shedding skin and hair and making way for the new - we make ourselves from the blueprint of our DNA, our genome. Genomes work with cells from various parts of the body to continuously renew our living systems: our organs. Including our brain, stomach, and heart, who as modern research suggests, all contribute to our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Heart cells talk to brain cells who talk to brain cells and let us know what we think, what we feel, what we know. However, genomes don’t get the final say in how our genes actually show up.
Around our genomes is a layer of chemical markers that influence the cells called epigenomes. Think of the epigenomes as a coach who gets to decide who is playing the field and who is a benchwarmer. However, the coach is influenced by the ecosystem. What we eat, where we live, how much pollution we absorb, if we sit all day or don’t smoke or even our trauma or intergenerational trauma can influence the ecosystem which turns on and off our DNA codes via the epigenome; the coach.
The epigenome decides what actually gets represented in our bodies and who we present as to the world. Or perhaps even more meta who you present yourself to yourself as. Who I am to myself has been worked over and warped by decades of abuse and trauma. And is now sun-bathing in the mediterranean lapping up the nurturing effects of sunny relationships, good food, child-like play, and re-parenting self-love. Thus, now in the shallows of clear blue waters, pieces of myself return to my shores and I must inspect them with the fervor of a scientist looking at a new specimen. How do I remember you? How do I re-member me?
Still, the little piece of sea-glass booying in my palm is still here asking me to look deeply at her, me, it. I am now beginning to understand that through all the places I have been, the trauma I have endured, that little pieces of good, true, and honest parts of me were left behind in the process. It is time to return those parts of me to myself.