I am reading a book at the moment called Brain Rules about how the brain works and I am up to a chapter on how memories are formed, stored and deleted.
Some memories are kept because they are necessary for survival and some are too momentous to not get carefully filed away and then there's other stuff that are neither but are either stored or deleted for no discernible reason.
It made me wonder about some of my memories or lack of them and triggers to bring old ones to the the "front" of my mind.
I was baking biscuits yesterday and it brought back a memory from a Home Ec class when I was at school long, long ago in a place.....well not that far away. We were making cakes and one girl grabbed a straw broom, broke off one of the straws and used it to test if the cake was cooked. The teacher saw it and freaked out. She told the girl she was a disgusting dirty creature to use a straw from a filthy broom to stick in a cake. Of course the girl was humiliated and I suspect very hurt in a different than the teacher would have expected. I would bet a stack of money she had picked up this habit from her mother. I know this because I have a very distinct memory of my mother doing the exact same thing and I in turn had also done it, thankfully not in front of that teacher. I never did it again after that day because I realised it is a pretty gross thing to do.
So I'll call that a kind of social survival memory. My next set of stored and deleted memories a a bit more mysterious in why they exist or not.
My mum died when I was seven and although I was so young I have clear memories of her, like the straw broom thing. I remember going places with her and the rest of the family, her being in hospital after the birth of my younger sister (I was only two and a half) and again visiting her when she was in hospital towards the end.
I have no doubt she loved me, but I have no memory of her ever saying anything nice to me, only memories of when I had been in trouble for doing something naughty and in one very clear memory when I had done nothing wrong and she was in fact wrong (an early lesson that parents are not really all knowing) so no mystery why I would remember that occasion.
It almost sounds like one of those cliché stories you hear that stress the importance of making sure you tell everyone you love then frequently just in case you kick the bucket suddenly and regret for all eternity while sitting on clouds playing a harp.
Sometimes I feel a bit ripped off, but I am not one of those people who blame everything that might go wrong in life on my parents (waaaaahhh, my mother never said she loved me). I have a heap of stupid memories that come back to me a odd moments that I REALLY wish would be deleted forever, but never a happy mum and me moment. I do have heaps of great memories with my dad, but I had him for a whole lot longer and, importantly, as an adult. I sometimes wish I had asked my Dad before I lost him for a reminder of what my relationship with my mother was like, but somehow it always felt like I would be criticising her to the man who loved her until the day he died.
So memories and gaps in them are tricky. Sometimes the deleted ones turn out to be more valuable than our brains thought they would be. Perhaps my young brain considered remembering the details of parent child relationships was a bit of a waste of space given all the important stuff to come that could be a matter of life of death. There should have been lots of time to form those memories.
Poor brain, just like parents they are not infallible.
