Before I Forget

Notes on pregnancy and learning to remember.

Dear friend,

They say as time passes, you begin to forget the little details of what it was like to be pregnant. They say you forget the intensity of the birth, as if the pain wasn’t a kind of its own, seared into your cells as a memory for all of time.

They say as time passes, you begin to forget the little details of their first few weeks, months and years. The tiny memories of everyday minutes morph into a highlights reel of the big moments that stand out. Almost as if our minds had a storage capacity, where instead of paying to upgrade each month, we’re forced to actually filter it.

They say forgetting is an important part of the human race continuing. They joke that if we remembered everything our bodies went through, we wouldn’t keep doing it.

They say, they say, they say…

How strange it is to think that the most profound experience of becoming a mother – of creating and bringing life into this world – could be so easily forgotten?

How strange it is to think that it’s become so trivi…