What will they remember?

            This past Thursday and Friday Polly and Pip were out of school for fall break. Taking advantage of these extra days, our family made a short trip south to spend the night at a local state park lodge. It turned out to be a very pleasant experience for us. The kids traveled well. They loved getting out in the woods and playing near the waterfall that was the park’s centerpiece attraction. They reveled in the opportunity to sleep in a hotel bed and eat restaurant food. They happily smiled for pictures in front of various sites.

At five and seven they seem to have entered a sweet spot with regards to these kinds of trips. They’re old enough now to handle the ups and downs of doing new things. They can sufficiently enjoy the moments of excitement and manage the moments of boredom. They gleefully hiked down to the falls and then powered back out of the gorge even though we were pushing up against our usual dinner time. They didn’t get cranky while we waited for our food to come out. Later, they played hide and seek in the room while Ava took a shower.

They also did the little things that smooth out the rough edges of a trip like this. They interacted with the staff at the lodge in a confident and polite way. They read books when we needed to wait for traffic at a construction site. They played merrily on the river bank while Ava and I watched this huge raptor circle high above us, agitating the crows along the cliffline. They didn’t whine about going somewhere else or doing something else. They only wanted to be with us and each other. It was wonderful.

            As we drove home on Friday afternoon with the kids napping peacefully in the backseat, Ava whispered across to me,

“I wonder what they’ll remember about this?”

There were so many nice moments – watching those birds, catching sight of a long, garter snake shuffling through the leaves, visiting the waterfall in the fading evening light with a half-moon glowing above us and nothing else around but the sound of the falls, playing Candyland on the lodge floor the next morning while it rained buckets outside, going back down to the waterfall after the rain passed and seeing the huge boulders on the lower side of the falls, sticking branches in the pools of rain water and stirring up the sand from the bottom, trying to hit some of the boulders with little bits of smoothed coal that were strewn along the river’s edge – it was painful to think about how quickly they would fade in Pip and Polly’s minds. Of course we took some pictures, and Ava and I will talk from time to time about some of the things we enjoyed so much, but it’s likely that only one or two moments from that trip will really get etched in their minds and become symbolic of the trip as a whole.

And we won’t know for six months or so what those are going to be. It may just as well be the weird shower head in the bath room or the hammocks we played on out front or the kitschy gemstone mining setup near the gift shop as any of the things I listed above. Hopefully, whatever it is that sticks, they’ll at least feel a vague sense of joy at the mention of the state park and remember that they went there with their parents and that it was fun. If all that comes to pass, then that will be enough.


This mystery about what things the kids will remember represents one of the greatest psychological challenges of parenthood. So many things good and bad happen in the process of raising children and most of it goes off into the mists of time. The few chunks that stick in their minds are often random and irrational - Pip remembers that his first poop on the toilet happened the day Polly first came home from the hospital; Polly remembers running down the long hallway in the apartment we lived in three years ago - yet they have so much power to shape how the kids think about themselves, their parents, their childhood. It seems unfair. We can influence those memories some with the pictures we take and the stories we tell, but so much of that narrative is beyond our control. Despite all the work we put in to raise our kids in a happy, joyous environment, chance still plays such a huge role in what they remember and consequently what they know. The best we can do is overwhelm them with love and hope that these efforts become a majority of what sticks.