Different Memories of the Same Experience

On this Father's Day, I wondered what my father's life was like. He and my mother had six kids, many of whom were ushered into this world a bit late in my parents' lives. I was the youngest; my father was 50 when I was born, my mother was 45. Obviously, their ages and their experience rearing children for many years before I was born had a big impact on the way they looked at me. And, I've come to conclude, everyone in my family had a unique perspective on what their lives were really like. And for each of us, our perspectives and our realities were very, very different.

My two oldest brothers and my oldest sister must have had an utterly different perspective on life than did the other three of us. Their very young lives must have been tied up very tightly with a relatively small family. When they think back on their early years, their memories don't include the other three of us. Their early years represented lives that have absolutely no meaning to the rest of us, especially to me. I know nothing of what it was like to be a part of my family when there were just three kids and my parents. I can't even begin to understand what that life was like. Nor, I suspect, can my other sister and my other brother. We weren't there. We were not even on the horizon, not in my family's experiences. We were the unknown, unexpected, unexperienced future.

My youngest sister and my brother who is only five years older than I still had a pretty large family for a good portion of their formative years. They had a mother and a father and two older brothers and an older sister. They were a family of seven.

I never thought much about how my perspective was so utterly different from my siblings' until recently. I don't know what made me start to think about it; I guess it seemed strange to hear them talk about their childhoods and those childhoods seemed very different from mine. By the time I was truly aware of what was going on in my life, with my family, my oldest brother had left home for college and his younger brother wasn't far behind. Both of my sisters were part of my youngest years, but not for many years. My clearest memories of growing up involve only my youngest brother, the one who's five years older than I. The other siblings were in and out of my life for several years, but they were not in my life day in and day out. They had already moved into their teen years or beyong, developing their own relationships and their own versions of families outside the nuclear sphere.

So, how do my siblings' lives differ from mine? They grew up in a very large family...or, I should say, they evolved from childhood to adulthood during the evolution of my family from being a small family to being a much larger family. I grew up in a shrinking family. It started large, but shrunk quickly as brothers and sisters left for college or otherwise moved out of the nuclear unit. My youngest brother and I were the remnants of a family that had already begun to disintegrate before we ever had the chance to understand what a "big" family was. But our similarities in terms of familial experience did not translate into other similarities. He was uninterested in school, in academics, and he was unfocused. I found school exciting and appealing, at least until my early high school years. Something happened to make it less appealing during those latter years, but I kept at it. My brother discarded it, understanding more deeply than I did that academic education is valuable only for those who acquire its astute cousin, social skills.

Social skills didn't get taught to the two youngest in my family, at least social skills were not given the attention that they deserved. By the time my brother and I were ready to learn them, my parents had tired of teaching them and they assumed, I must think in retrospect, that their other children would pass those skills along to their siblings. I'm sure they would have, but the siblings were off in pursuit of their own lives. I don't think it occurred to my parents that the skills they taught their older children might skip a generation because, in essence, my parents did. They had their youngest children so late in life that much of what they took care to teach to their younger children simply was forgotten, or was left to my elder sisters and brothers without those siblings being informed that they were expected to assume the responsibility for knowledge transfer to their youngest siblings.

All of this isn't particularly meaningfull except, perhaps, to suggest to parents that the responsibilities of parenthood require attention even late in life, if one chooses to rear children after mid-life. Rearing three or four children can, I am sure, cause one to focus less attention on the specifics of what should be taught to the ones coming later. My parents certainly never intentionally failed to pass on ideas or knowledge or 'truth' to me, but after five others, five others who commanded their attention well into my own late childhood years, they can be forgiven if they didn't teach me the ABCs and the social graces with the fervor they had with their youngest.

But the point of all this was perspective. My brothers and sisters lived in the same house with their younger siblings and they watched those younger siblings grow into at least moderately aware humans. The younger of us, though, lived most of our formative lives in a small family, with few opportunities to learn from our older siblings; they were already gone away. My childhood remembrances are of a small family, my parents and my bother and me, with periodic visits by other siblings. My perspective on life is different because of that.

I remember my parents, at least in my earliest years of memory, as loving parents, but there was something else about them I remember. They were tired. There were tired of children, of the demands of children, of the energy that children demand of those around them. They had already given more than parents should ever be expected to give, yet they kept trying. But by then, the energy of youth and the idealism of inexperience had begun to diminish. So my life was very different from my bothers' and sisters' lives. I had different parents. I had different experiences. My parents had different children. They had different experiences.

It's almost as if we grew up in different families, sharing only the time and the people we all knew as family.

I miss my father. Still, to this day, I miss my father. And I miss my mother, as well. I wonder if I remember my family the was it was. Or is.

Happy Fathers' Day.