Our Bodies Do Remember

On girlhood, memory and fantasy

Rapture was what I saw on my daughter’s face as she gazed up at the choir that was to be her first ever concert at two-and-a-half years old.

Two-year olds are amazing because they are emotion unfiltered. Blisteringly sensitive to all stimuli at all times - what they feel, they really really feel. 

Because of this, and despite an initial rush of conviction that it was a great idea, I hesitated momentarily when buying the concert tickets. I imagined what it might be like for that pure ball of emotion to encounter the loud whooshing grandeur of piano and to absorb the cacophony of voices as they echoed around a room designed to amplify sound. I thought about how my own emotions vibrate when I hear live music, how soaring violin can bring tears to my eyes, and I hoped my daughter would not be totally overwhelmed, would not retain a memory of fear in years to come.

Despite my worries, I bought the tickets, and off we went. It was magical. She stared unblinking at the singers while her father and I stared unblinking at her beautiful face. Her fat bottom lip hung open, her eyes fixated on the point where the sounds were coming from, her chubby little fingers gripped our hands as if to say Hold me up I dunno if I can take it! – and, I swear I am not exaggerating for prosaic effect, her face actually glowed. A fucking light emanated from her.

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We do not retain memories from our infant years, but our bodies do remember. Mine does, at least. 

I do not remember going to my grandmother’s farmhouse when I was two, three, four. But I know that I did not like it, because when I think about that place now, a creeping black ink rises from my pelvis, into my stomach and up towards my chest, my heart. It’s all the information I need. I do not need a memory.

I’ve been traversing the landscape of memory because I’ve done a lot of therapy in recent years. It’s been life-changing. To begin to understand yourself through the imprints of the past is something I needed to do, to get well. But I’ve also found it fascinating, enjoyable, in a way that not everyone does. It has illuminated the experience of living for me and opened doors into long-shut rooms in my brain. 

Occasionally, I will be absorbed in the humdrum of my day, and one of the doors in my brain will fly open suddenly. One day, as I carried my daughter in my arms and we climbed the exit ramp of an underground car park, I could hear that a little bird was flapping around above us, bumping into the ceiling. I wondered if the little bird might be trapped and wanting to get out, and I looked up. But when I did, it was not the ceiling of the car park that I saw, but a corrugated-iron domed roof, broken and rusted in places, with wooden supporting beams that held bails of hay, rakes and shovels, a single bare lightbulb hanging low on shoddy wiring. The image was seeringly sharp and it came with a deadweight dread in the stomach that left me in no doubt as to its veracity: this was somewhere that I have been. And just as suddenly as the door had flown open, it shut again, and I was back on the ramp, holding my daughter's body a little closer to my own than I had been, before.

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Our bodies do remember. My body does remember.

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They tell me that body memory is, in fact, vital to our existence. That we were designed this way, for our survival. It’s supposed to go like this:

Our primary caregivers hold us in their arms as we sleep. They whisper and coo into our ears. They shield us from danger. Our infant bodies store the feelings of love and safety created by this care, and that cache of goodness remains in the body throughout our lives and nourishes us, plays its hugely undervalued role in our survival as individuals, and as a species.

But there is how it's supposed to go, and then there is how it sometimes goes. As readily as safety and love are stored in the body, so too are fear and doubt, so too are shame and abandonment. 

In all of this, and through the lens of my highly analytical mind, I see a great design flaw. It seems to me that mother nature designed a system (parenting) which relies heavily upon the availability of infallible, precision-engineered parts (parents). Did she not think to check if such perfect parts were available before she made the system that way? Or is it that the manufacturing environment has greatly deteriorated since her original conception of the system and that, where once there was an abundance of infallible parts, there is now a dearth? Have the waters been contaminated to such an extent that the parts are coming out all wonky and dented?

What is the point of a system like that when there isn't a parent in the world that hasn't failed their child? When there isn't a parent in the world that fails their child because they want to? When, tragically, it is often the parents who are fighting the hardest that fail their children in the most terrible ways?  

I don't know, people. 

All this talk of perfection - especially attributing perfection where it does not belong - is typically me. In my efforts to make sense of my existence, I get stuck in how things could be, should have been, will be one day, maybe. This is futile of course. As hard as I try, I can no more reverse engineer the harmful experiences of my past than I can lasso the chaos of the universe. Nothing already done can be undone. Acceptance is the only way.

As a mother, I am imperfect, just like all the others. But I have learned a few things along the way. And I know that my life’s greatest purpose is to shield my daughter, hold her close, give her the awe of a first concert, and whisper and coo A Stór A Chroí as she falls asleep at night, on all the nights, for as many nights as she may need it.

I hope her body will remember.

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Have you ever encountered a book that you felt certain was written just for you and you alone, so that you might find some solace in its pages? For me, that book is a gorgeous literary analysis of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe called The Magician’s Book: A Sceptic’s Adventures in Narnia. In this book, Laura Miller fantasises that pre-verbal children have a special ability to communicate with animals, and that this is why we cannot remember anything from those first years. Our grown up minds, clogged with reason as they are, would not be able to handle such a memory. We would experience a kind of psychic shock and the foundations of our ego would crumble and fall away.

This beautiful idea - this dream of a childhood so wonderful it cannot be remembered - has really stuck with me. It sat deep down into my consciousness and found a permanent home there. And on days when I tire of my analytical mind, I go there instead. I go to that fantastical place and find deep solace in it. 

Think about that for a minute. It is the fantasy that gives me solace, despite all the years of therapy, all the scientific studies I have read, and all the rational facts about childhood memory and trauma that I have learned. 

In the end, facts are only facts. They do not always capture the truth. Sometimes, it is a fantasy that we need. Sometimes, it is a fantasy that brings us closest to who we truly are.

I hope, as always, that you have found something true for yourself in what you have read here.

Photo by Amy Treasure on Unsplash