Son of like father, like son
Monday, February 21, 2005 at 07:50PM My journal entry Like father, like son got me thinking more about how alike or how different I am from The Toddler. Not so much now, but when I was The Toddler. Did I act like he did when I was his age? Did I look like him when I was his age?
Of course my memories of toddlerdom were conveniently erased by my brain. I'm not really sure when I actually began to retain memories of my childhood, but it was probably somewhere around kindergarten. The pre-K period is pretty much a clean slate.
A toddler's inability to retain memory gives parents what amounts to a four- to five-year pass in the history books. All the mistakes they made are wiped clean from the toddler's memory bank. (Perhaps this phenomenon might explain the last presidential election as well. It's as good a theory as any, I suppose.)
So when we reach adulthood, where do we go to bring back those lost memories? We go, of course, to pictures. Now this is where parents today are making a huge mistake. Everything that kids do today is recorded, either by photographs, videotape or digital imagery. Our kids eventually will grow up and review these recorded histories and, inevitably, will come to resent if not vilify us for doing the things that parents do to kids, like dressing them up in bumblebee outfits.
Most of our parents were cunning enough to not leave many clues from our toddler years behind. My parents left one photo album of my lost years. It is filled with fading, mostly black-and-white images of these early formative years. I'm fortunate to even have that. My parents didn't make the same mistake twice. My younger sister's album is empty. Really, it is.
So it was into this photo album that I began to dig for answers. Were there pieces of me at that early age that I can now see in my son? Below are some answers, in photographic form. I'll let you be the judge. The black-and-white photos are obviously me.
Reader Comments (5)
The pride he exudes is almost palpable.
I really beleieve that toddler years are far from lost and that every single second is stored in memory.The most important memories,those which have tremendous impact on how we behave as adults and who we ultimately become as persons, dwarf and eclipse the less important memories such as who did what and when. Twenty years from now my kids may have difficulty recalling the silly games we played or the books we read together. They will, however,in the deep fibers that touch their souls, remember not just who I was but what kind of a man I worked to become, what kind of a father I strived to be. They will remember my detication to my family and my optimistic outlook on life and countless other things about me all of which they absorbed during their highly impressionable toddler years.
If I have done my job the way I hope to, they will want to walk in my shoes as teens, as adults, as parents, as decent and copassionate human beings. All this starts in the toddler years and, quite possibly,the first days of life. Although our kids may end up walking in our shoes as adults,it is probable that they will walk a different path and encounter many differnt forks in the road than we did. It therefore is imperative that we give them the best possible shoes for their journey.
I wholeheartedly concur with your sentiments. I certainly didn't mean at all to imply that our kids aren't learning from us. Their little minds are growing at an extraordinary rate. They're literally bombarded with new things, so much so that they couldn't possibly retain all of it. But, I think, they do collect all of the pieces and eventually put them all together.
This puts a tremendous responsibility on us as parents to lead them in the right direction. Perhaps my use of "the lost years" was misinterpreted. That was meant only as we, as adults, look at those years. When we look back on things we've seen and done, we aren't able to pull any memories from those early years. That's not to imply, however, that we didn't learn from our parents as our kids now learn from us.
Finally, it is fun to see my toddler walking in my shoes. There's no doubt that there's a glow in his eyes when he puts them on. Certainly he's thinking, I'm just like dah-dee. But as much as I enjoy watching him walking in my shoes, I think I'll get even more joy and satisfaction when I see him one day walking in his own shoes, taking all that I have given him in his own direction and perhaps one day leading his own kids in those shoes.
It seems probable to me that if anyone attempted to concentrate deeply enough in a relaxed state,that person might be successful at coming away with glimpses of events that occured in early childhood (some experts strongly believe we can even go as far back as before birth). The problem is that nobody ever really tries.
Is there a spell-checker on this thing?