My husband had a story that he would tell me in the first years of our relationship. The story was about this incredible house with elaborate painted turned posts on the porch. A previous owner was alleged to have been buried in the front yard in a sitting up position. He remembered this story from when he lived in Dublin, Virginia while he was in junior high school. He told me this story many times. Then one day we drove to Dublin.

On a hill overlooking the highway on a small plot of land where the
splendid house with the fancy porch trim was supposed to be was an
unremarkable looking Mission style house with square porch posts and no
other trim at all. Nor was there any fancy paint. The house was the
sort that looked as though it never had had any fancy paint. The front
yard was a normal looking front yard with no marker of anyone buried
there. If someone was buried there, it would be hard to imagine WHY
they would have wanted to be buried there. The house was old enough to
have been there long before my husband’s junior high years.

My husband was astonished. It varied so remarkably from his oft told
description and his memory. It had to have been the same house.
Whatever it was about the house that had impressed itself in his memory
wasn’t there now and looked as though it never had been. Perhaps this
rather unremarkable Mission style house was the fanciest thing he had
seen at that point in his life when he was a young teenager? Then, as
time went along and he moved away and saw other houses, he improved on
that house in his memory bit by bit till it was an extravagant example
of Victorian architecture. He wanted his memory to be the wonderful
memory that it was. He didn’t want the memory to change or be
diminished by what he saw later in life. So the house got better and
better.

Whatever the reason, the same kind of memory magic has happened to
me and to him on several occasions. One time when he was an adult and
in his early thirties he saw a plaster figure in the collection of a
friend. He offered to pay $10,000 for it, an offer which was rejected.
Then he didn’t see the figure for about 10 years. He told me about it
and how incredible it was. Finally we went to visit the collector who
had decided to sell the piece. But it wasn’t anywhere near as wonderful
as he remembered and he was happy to be able to leave without having to
buy it. It wasn’t really wonderful at all.

One of my first memories is from when I was two years old and
fastened by a harness and a leash to the back porch of the apartment
building where my parents lived. There was a huge dog, about the size
of a St. Bernard, on the stairs of the porch. If I tried to go near the
porch, it barked and threatened me. It was HUGE! Years later I asked my
mother about the dog. She remembered it and said that it was a very
small puppy.

Another memory was when I was an adult and had gone to an auction. I
am an antiques dealer. There was an antique blanket chest there, a
small chest in the most gorgeous powder blue. I was outbid on the
chest. I regretted not having bid higher and I kept thinking of this
exquisite blanket chest which I had let get away. Then I saw it again
when it was brought into an antiques show I was doing. It had grown
larger, darker, and was in not as great a condition as I had remembered
it. How could it possibly be the same chest? But it was.

When Roseanne, the actress, comedienne, and celebrity, spoke up
years ago about the abuse she said she had suffered at the hands of her
parents, I was shocked that her parents would treat her that way. Then
I heard that they took a lie detector test, both of them, and passed
it. The situation appalled me. How could someone lie about their
parents. My daughter would never do that. Until she did. Is it too
confrontational to say it that way? Lie might not be the right word.

I know she reads this and that my using that word will anger her. It
might help if I say that, yes, I think she remembers something about a
pool and a diving board and being afraid and feeling harangued but I am
sure that the actual event differed in the details.

I don’t know why Roseanne’s and her parents’ accounts of her
childhood are so different but in the case of my daughter, perhaps she
is looking for evidence of what she perceives currently as my intrinsic
meanness to bolster her reasons for being estranged from me. Anything
in her memory that fits at all into her picture of mean me could help
paint her picture more vividly.

Memory. What a strange and perverse thing it is. It is our friend and then sometimes our enemy.

I have no memory of the swimming pool incident that she wrote about
online. That was the first I heard of it. The reason it makes no sense
for me to do that, outside of the fact that I am NOT intrinsically
mean, is that I am a poor swimmer, can’t jump off a diving board
without fear, instruction, and encouragement (and I can hardly do so
even then), and I can’t swim well enough to save anyone who was a poor
swimmer if they jumped off and things didn’t go well. I wouldn’t
harangue anyone to jump off a diving board, least of all my daughter. I
wouldn’t be able to give them instruction in HOW to jump off a diving
board. Jumping off of diving boards is something that I am rather
clueless on.

However, is it possible that if there were a number of experienced
swimmers present at some pool and my young daughter was on a diving
board where I assisted others in encouraging her to jump off the board
while she was given instruction? Yes, it is possible. I have NO memory
of even seeing my daughter on a diving board or of her ever jumping off
a diving board but it is possible that she was on one many years ago.
She hasn’t told me when this incident occurred or where it occurred or
who else was present so I have no idea of what it is other than what it
might be. It is possible that a nervous fearful child who was on a
diving board for possibly the first time heard well meant words of
encouragement as a harangue. Whether this is the explanation for her
memory is another thing that I don’t know.

Accusing me of haranging her to jump off a diving board has
similarities to accusing me of haranguing her while trying to teach her
calculus. I am worse at calculus than I am at swimming and diving off
of diving boards.

The pattern here is one of her choosing the only explanation for a
memory of me, a memory that is consistent with her chosen view of me.
She cannot tolerate the idea that there is another explanation of this
memory of me, a kinder gentler explanation. She prefers the one of me
as being a meanie.

Me? Mean? It has only been in recent years that I can bring myself
to kill a spider when I find it in the house and only if it is a great
inconvenience to catch it, open the window, and put it outside. For
much of my life I have struggled with being assertive, with going ahead
and doing things that are important to me rather than choosing what
makes someone else happy. I spend a fair amount of my time helping
other people with no recompense to me of anything except an occasional
thank you. I made countless choices in my life where I put both my
daughter and her father first, just as many women who are mothers and
wives do. Yet my daughter chooses to remember me as the mean mother who
harangued her on a diving board and to vilify me because I defend
myself.

If this has happened to you that an estranged relative tells people
things about you that didn’t happen in the way that they say that they
happened, perhaps this is the explanation, that the memory fits in with
how they want to see you. All the positive things that happened don’t
fit with the memory so they don’t share those memories with people or
even think about the positive memories themselves.

In the movie The Squid and The Whale, the turning point for the
older son in his perception of his divorcing parents was when the
therapist asks him to recall a positive memory and he remembers
visiting the diorama at the Museum with his mother and how he and his
mother would talk about the visit to the museum when they were home by
themselves in the pleasant quiet with no one else around. When he
remembers the positive, allows himself to remember the positive, he
sees his parents in a different light and he changes too. But in his
case, perhaps he wanted to change.

If someone doesn’t want to change, then there is no hope for change.
I’ve known a number of people in my life who don’t want to change and
they have convinced me of that. If someone wants to see you in a
certain way, regardless of how inconsistent with the facts that way is,
then that is the way that they will see you.

Snicks