🧵Thursday Thread: What is your earliest childhood memory, and how does it influence who you are today?

Annie Dillard said, "Childhood memories are like breadcrumbs, leading us back to the essence of who we are." Let's follow the trail today, see what we find, share a little crumb of essence & insight!

Friends, it’s been such a beautiful & emotional time here on the beach.

This photo is me, over the weekend, with

Billie Oh

, who flew down with Z to visit for several idyllic days. It was Z’s first airplane ride, his first time seeing and swimming in the ocean, first time running free on an ocean beach, first time being on a vacation. Also, first time riding in a golf cart, haha.

And first time being together with us and B since the court procedure at the end of January that formalized the pathway to adoption that is now underway, making Z and Billie and us another kind of family now. I can’t share photos of Z until the adoption process is final (and it takes many months). Even then, Billie will oversee what if anything of Z appears online. But, meanwhile, however, I can and am sharing with you that my heart is on the outside right now, pulsing with so much love and also with, inevitably, sorrow for all that has already been lost for this child, and is being lost still.

Nothing is ever just one thing.

Maybe this is why your “I Remember” pieces on Wednesday’s post (Memory undergirds a sense of continuity around who we have been, who we are, and who we will become…) have moved me so profoundly. I am floating on a sea of awareness, an unusually heightened awareness of childhood and its dual nature, how it is simultaneously fleeting and forever. Your letters to your younger selves last week were similarly moving.

This week, let’s share our our earliest childhood memory (or any powerful childhood memory, if we don’t know whether it’s our earliest or not) and ideas of how it shapes who we are now.

You don’t have to make these fancy or literary! On the other hand, allowing yourself to dwell in the house of specific, concrete sensory detail will inevitably bring your memory closer to you, bring it more alive in the space around you, if that’s something you want. Sometimes, such remembered details make for good “starter” material, as with sourdough bread, and can bring a later batch of writing to life, if you like, but only if you like.

For today, this is only for remembering and musing aloud on the path from there to here.

I will be honored to receive your memories, whether happy or sad or funny or strange or dreamy.

Love,
Jeannine