Early childhood: what a wipeout, memory-wise. I was alive for Woodstock, for the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, for the moon landing, for the better part of the Vietnam War. I don’t remember any of it.
Forty-plus years later, I’m having a similar experience with parenthood. The nights of ragged sleep begin to blur together; the mini-dramas of my first daughter are replaced by the mini-dramas of my second. As parents, we fight this creeping amnesia (our main weapon: a glut of digital photographs). Some of us write about it.
I recently read a terrifically ambitious and innovative poetry collection that takes on pregnancy and early childhood (along with a wealth of other things: the 2008 financial crisis, the fluidity of sexual identity, the elasticity of language). The book is Amy Sara Carroll’s Fannie + Freddie; Carroll’s methods of engagement include exuberant puns, found text, historical detours, and strikethroughs. The strikethroughs both call our attention to the revision process, to our ever-changing sense of what’s important and what’s not, and they make us (or me, anyway) even more eager to read what’s been partially obscured. (Sometimes a student will turn in a paper with a sentence or two carefully blacked out, and I’ll spend more time than I should holding the paper up to a light, trying to decipher whatever the Sharpie has concealed.) Here are the opening lines to Carroll’s “Creationism”:
I’m stumped, stagnant as a pool of water at the foot of a bed. Sorrow sours, comes to a head, swerving to avoid right from wrong. In the beginning, I copped a dream, cupped as a firefly in the palms: no-muss, no-fuss parenthood, short and sassy, a page-boy do. I peed on a stick, lickety-split, I was riper than a musk melon. Boom! Faster than a light-rail, truth began to tug on my tail. Inside me, another cantaloupe grew. Summer was Fall was Winter . . . I knew the seasons of my life set sail. The breath thickened, a light-saber quickened, complication ensued. A partnership, a two-pronged attack, my body besieged, besmirched, ballooned. The air hung heavy, She said— She said—. I lied myself to sleep, I wept, turning like a rotisserie chicken. I behaved as badly as the next woman in the next apartment in the next building in the next block in the next city in the next state . . . ad infinitum.
(Side note: Is the dream of poetry to wreck poetry? Or if not to wreck it, to at least upend it, expose it—to lay bare its predictable patterns of epiphany and flight? Reading Carroll’s book made me feel dissatisfied with so much that passes for poetry. I found myself craving her urgent testimony, her plosives and explosives. “The Banality of Evil,” an early poem from her collection, begins: “Why did the chicken cross the road? There’s something vindictive about the family romance, which comes on swiftly like an asthma attack.” It ends: “I trip the wire to cross the street.”)
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So that’s one way to hold on to memories: turn them into poems, into made things. But what if memory itself starts to slip? And what happens when the blank slate of our final years begins to match the blank slate of childhood, or even pre-childhood? As Larkin writes in “The Old Fools”:
It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend
There’ll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines—
How can they ignore it?
“Well, we shall find out,” as the poem concludes. In the meantime, we have the words and drawings of Roz Chast, whose recently released graphic memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? tracks her parents’ difficult decline. Chast is best known for her anxiety-fueled single-panel New Yorker cartoons; her memoir, which may be sampled here, wrestles with familial obligations and impending oblivion. But maybe oblivion is the wrong word, as it derives from the Latin oblivio, “to forget.” Chast’s offering is an act of remembrance. In her epilogue, she writes:
I like having my parents in my closet. The thought of burying their cremains in an arbitrary hole in the ground does not appeal to me. We don’t have a family plot, so choosing one cemetery over another seems random. Throwing their ashes off the side of a boat makes as much sense to me as tossing them in a wastebasket at Starbucks.
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That’s a funny line, from an ultimately serious book. I’ve been thinking about the funny and the serious, about blank slates and the various ways we fill them. My older daughter is almost four years old; she’s interested in jokes. But she doesn’t know many jokes, or even the templates for jokes. A few weeks ago, after we’d read a remarkable chapter in Mary Poppins Comes Back that featured a few jokes (and that also featured the Dance of the Wheeling Sky, in which the witch-nanny waltzes with the sun), I asked my daughter, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” She thought about it for a moment, and then answered, with some confidence, “Because it was sad.”
Yes, of course, obviously.