Flashbulb memories

In what I believe to be my first waking memory, I’m watching a scene unfold in two vignettes. The first one contains my mother, who’s slamming the front door as she leaves our home. I can’t see her face or hear her voice, but I know it’s my mother because she was gone for a while thereafter.

The second vignette contains my father, wedged between my sister and I in an embrace. We’re sitting on a sofa and crying into his figure, a consequential response to my mother’s grand exit. Oddly, my vantage point in this memory is askew. I have no recall of burying my face in my father’s arms, or looking across his chest to see my sister’s red and puffy face up close. Instead, I’m sitting front row center towards the tiny stage of a living room that I don’t quite remember. This glitch in my viewpoint is inexplicable, but I’d guess it to be a mutation of my periodic childhood amnesia.

By displacing myself off the couch and into the role as spectator, I’d allowed the memory to be encoded and stored. To make room for other memories. Like the time I played in the sandbox and a thousand fire ants seized my bare legs and it scared me watching them go down the drain of the tub because I thought they might crawl back up.

***

“I don’t want to go,” I sobbed, hugging my mother’s waist. I was gasping for air in-between words, forgetting to breathe as children do when they cry and speak at the same time. Her perfume and shampoo encompassed me, cloudlike. I’ve since come to fawn over this effect, studying the women I pass in the grocery store who can apply fragrant products so that it smells and balms just-so. I’ve never had success, and am convinced it’s a divine skill bequeathed unto beautiful women upon childbirth.

We’re at the airport gate and I’m headed home after our annual summer-long visitation. She’s crying too, but eventually scoots me towards the line that enters the plane. I’m wearing a brand-new outfit with brand-new shoes, purchased by her of course, one of the many that new things I’d come home with at the end of those short-but-long summertime months. While most of my classmates spent their summers forging friendships with the kids in the neighborhood whom they might not otherwise, I’d vanish in its entirety and reappear forcefully evolved. Out-of-place trendy. My mother did right by me in this way though. At that age, the Skechers and butterfly appliqué shirts and Sanrio stationary made not being normal feel better than normal; special.

***

Artemis, the goddess of the Moon, is also the goddess of contradictions, it’s said. Although a protector of young children and pregnant women, she’d been known to bouts of rage at the expense of those she protected. In one of her wraths, Artemis strikes down Niobe’s daughters with arrows to avenge the pride of their mother. Nonetheless, Artemis was revered – is revered.

Birthday cakes, it’s said, are reverences to Artemis. Worshippers who visited her temple would bring round cakes, whose shape represented the moon she personified. They’d adorn the cakes with candles, and the smoke would carry prayers up to the goddess, it’s said. And hence the tradition we have today, of making quiet, prayer-like wishes on round birthday cakes, timed precisely when the little fires turn to wisps of smoke.

For years, my birthday wish was the same. My own ritual of rituals. Even then, I felt shrewd beyond my peers for this; never having to panic between a puppy or hamster or Nintendo was a mark of pride for me, and I’d blow my candles out quickly and confidently to assert this among onlookers. It wasn’t quite Wow, this girl knows what she wants, but it kind of was to me. To be fair, I’d used it for everything – shooting stars, coins flipped into mall fountains, that one time I split a wishbone at Thanksgiving, but that’s not the point.

All children with divorced parents have this birthday wish. It only comes true 6% of the time, it’s said.

***

“Do you remember her at all?” We both couldn’t sleep.

“No, I was very little when she left.” My mom tried to sound matter of fact, but her words fell solemnly in my dark studio apartment.

I envisioned my favorite picture of her as a child. She’s crouched in front of a stone building, clumsily holding up a small dog that’s half her size. It must’ve been a holiday or special occasion because she’s wearing the traditional Korean dress, called a hanbok. Coupled with the photo’s black and white coloration, it seems like a relic from some ancient imperial dynasty.

I pressed for more details about her childhood, embarrassed that she’d never shared them with me before. She went on to tell me about her stepmother, who’d sent her away to live in a monastery for a year when she was eight years old. Growing up, my mom was forced to cook and clean for the entire family, including her aunts and siblings. Her stepmom routinely beat her. When my mom got older though, she returned the favor. Her stepmom never touched her again after that.

A streetlamp outside cast a hazy white fog through the window, just enough so I could see my mother curled up on her side. She lay next to me on my full-size bed, and I stared at her back to see if her shoulder blades or the nape of her neck could indicate any emotion. She appeared childlike in that position, and I’d wondered if she felt that way, too, when talking about her childhood. I’d wondered if it was therapeutic for her, or painful, or both. I’d wondered if she was angry at her mom for not being there, or missed her and regretted not knowing her. I’d wondered if she understood her, but only later on, once she had kids of her own.