When my son Ralph was born, we were prepared. Read More: Your Biggest Questions About Kids and Phones, Answered A childhood that isn’t backed up to the cloud, archived and available for download. I’d forgotten about our dad’s George Harrison phase in the ’80s, where he let his hair grow out long and wavy.Īm I a part of the last generation to have a forgettable childhood? Not an uneventful childhood, but a childhood that has the ability to be forgotten, to be tossed into a dumpster or burned in a fire. I’d forgotten about my favorite sweatshirt’s white crewneck with a purple image of a stegosaurus emblazoned across the front until I saw a photo of 5-year-old Nora wearing it. Without this book and the few boxes rotting in a storage unit somewhere, my childhood would not exist outside of my memory and the memories of my family. All that lay ahead was an hour-long drive back to a house where she could sink into the second shift of packing our lunches, hounding my brothers about homework, and making sure we were generally nourished, bathed, and ready for the day ahead.
LOUD KITCHEN TIMER PROFESSIONAL
When she left that rural photo studio, her professional work was done. The baby book, who includes photos as well as childhood ephemera like broken baby teeth (tucked into an envelope labeled “probably yours”), is evidence not only of my childhood, but of her motherhood.
My mother shopped in the bulk section of the grocery store and usually ate a dinner of Fritos dipped into cottage cheese, which she enjoyed while hunching over the kitchen counter as her ungrateful children took turns whining over whatever meal she’d made after a three-hour round-trip commute to the small town where she laid out catalogs for seasonal tchotchkes for eight hours. Any attention I got was simultaneously too much and never enough, and whose fault could that be other than my mother’s? Several of my friends had stay-at-home moms who welcomed us home from school with pitchers of Kool-Aid and frozen sliders fresh from the oven because they were a family whose driveway was graced bi-weekly with a Schwan’s refrigerated truck delivering all kinds of high-priced, highly processed frozen foods. I was the third of four children, sandwiched between two brothers, the youngest of whom was obviously my mother’s favorite.
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