My six-month-old son woke up screaming at 3 AM.
It was the third time that night. He’s a baby, this is normal for infants. But this time things were different: I was looking at Christmas decorations and presents piled up in our nursery. And as I stood there rocking him to sleep, a thumb on his pacifier so he wouldn’t spit it out, it dawned on me that these are special parenting moments that nobody celebrates. With no monetary incentive to make an ad out of it or a big dramatic payoff at the end of it to sell a plot beat, billions of parents pass through these child-rearing instances and yet they go unnoticed and untalked about.
But if we don’t mark these moments, they will be forgotten.
Weeks after my son was born, he used to find the noise “engh!” hilarious. Just the one syllable, repeated over and over would have him in paroxysms of laughter. Oftentimes he laughed so hard he’d get the hiccups.
It became a routine with us, like the well-worn bits a late-night talk show host or morning radio DJ uses to get their audiences through the day. I’d make the noise, and he’d laugh. It got us through diaper changes, doctors’ visits, car rides, crying fits, feedings, and more.
Then one day a few weeks later it ceased to be funny. He just looked at me stone-faced like he usually does, as if not comprehending what I was saying. The joke died, and after much trial and error, I eventually found another bit that got him laughing.
Within days I’d forgotten we ever did the “engh!” game.
The phases we go through in our lives are composed of these moments. They are routine and normal and even mundane until the day they are not. Soon we forget the old routines altogether and the delight or comfort that came with them. My son almost certainly won’t remember them, other than as a vague feeling (if we’ve done this right) that he’s always been loved.
But there are memories we all have, the warm and fuzzy, the surprising and ecstatic, which we revisit with great fondness. Many of them seem to occur around holidays. Opening the gift we’ve been wanting all year long, cold walks by a frozen lake followed by hot chocolate and family dinners, greeting old relatives by the door, long catchups late into the night. It is believed that memories are created when our minds experience strong emotions that are outside of our ordinary feelings. The fact that these events occur during times of the year when our sensory experiences are heightened by bright lights, sweet and spicy smells, a schedule upset by a break from school or work, and indoor pine trees wherever we go make them all the more likely to get stored in our long term memories.
Many of these memories are from when we were young because novelty ensures our brains’ are more aware and thus more likely to be imprinted by the ensuing moment. The older we get, the less-novel our experiences seem and so are less likely to be noticed, much less remembered. The holidays, coming as they do only once a year, happen after long enough absences that their triggers can also seem novel again. This is also why you see Christmas lights on some houses in March or even June. After the novelty wears off, we cease to notice them and forget that they haven’t been taken down.
But just because there are a bunch of triggers designed to put us in a mood to fondly remember certain days of the year, doesn’t mean we can’t create fond memories from our everyday. If the difference between a holiday and any day is the intensity of the positive emotions we experience around that day, then there’s no reason we can’t bring the same presence of mind to our own non-holiday moments.
One way to do this is through gratitude journaling. Marking down the things we are grateful for every morning in an effort to engender some positive emotions about the day ahead. The only problem is I find they often become a routine instead of a moment to really get present. We crank through them on the way to completing our daily task lists, forgetting to really feel the emotional content in a way that embeds them in our minds.
Instead, I propose we reverse-engineer our best holiday memories and observe how we experience them: as a series of events tied to our senses which in turn trigger the strong emotions that were felt as they occurred. We remember the smell of cinnamon or the bright colors of a candy cane and the flicker of candlelight. The warm glow of a fire and the cozy embrace of our sweaters reflecting the warmth in our hearts for those dozing softly around us. In short, it’s the series of sensations or triggers that we are acutely aware of as they are happening that build into our favorite emotion-filled memories.
Next, we use these sensations to create a mini-questionnaire for when we find ourselves in a happy moment worth preserving.
What smells are present?
What sensations of touch are there?
What does this moment sound like?
How does it look?
How does it taste?
Finally, context: Why do I feel this way? what about this moment makes me feel the way that I do?
We can even take the answers and turn them into a checklist of sorts. So that when we want to revisit the memories we cherish deeply, we can ask the same questions to retrieve the same sensations felt during that moment.
And so, tired as I was that night while I quietly shushed my son, I reminded myself that these moments will stop one day. And I tried my best to preserve this one for when he no longer needs me to help him back to sleep. Thumb lightly grazing his pacifier, I noted the light sweet scent of baby detergent and formula. I watched in the dimness his tiny form and felt how his weight had already more than doubled since his birth. I put his bristly head to my face and listened as his breathing grew calmer. Then I put him down and heard his whimpers grown softer until they lapsed into baby snores.
This parenting moment is a gift, I told myself.
One I get to reopen whenever I want.