Mom on why she uses the social media
FROM the moment I found out I was pregnant, I decided to use my social media as a journal of sorts. I didn’t do it as a popularity contest, preening, or likes, although I got lots of messages or comments from people about how they enjoyed sharing in my journey.
Instead, it has really been a gift I gave to myself, so that I would never forget how I felt, and what was going on around me.
My paternal grandfather was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease in his late 50s. It was a long and painful process for my family. I watched the disease progress; I watched his memory melt away, along with his ability to recognize his family members and old friends. Eventually, he lost the ability to communicate his love, or any other thought, to us. It was heartbreaking and frightening to see all the things that Alzheimer’s stole from him and stole from me.
For a long time, I would often lay awake at night trying to remember back as far as I could. I worked hard to capture different things, both the extraordinary and the not so, just to flex my brain. Every time I struggled to recall something, it broke my heart a million times. I know it’s not something that I can control, if it’s in the cards that I end up with Alzheimer’s. But how do you make peace with something that could potentially be so devastating, and debilitating? What if I one day I couldn’t remember the day when my then boyfriend had a police car pull me over, and he got out of the car and proposed to me on a busy street?
What if I couldn’t remember the way my mother looked at my father and I the night before my wedding? As we stood under the dome of the capitol building practising the way that he would walk me down the aisle the next day, and give me away to my husband. What if I couldn’t remember how her smile looked, and how tears rolled down her cheeks? If I couldn’t remember how my dad’s fingers felt pressed up against my back as he hugged me when we reached the end of the hall? What if I couldn’t remember how cold it was in an exam room at my doctor’s office on February 4th, 2015? As I sat on an exam table, vulnerable, afraid, but sure that I was about to receive news that would break me.
Moments later, a doctor who wasn’t my own came in and told me that I was losing a baby I had gotten so excited to call my own. What if I forgot the feeling of the air being sucked out of my chest, and the room, and the universe in that moment? What if the feeling of complete despair, the gaping hole in my chest where hope was slipped away? What if I forgot one of the very best moments of my life that happened exactly 365 days after what I thought was the darkest? At the same doctor’s office again, in labour, with the baby boy that I had been praying for. I don’t ever want to forget the look on his face when they handed him to me. The way he smelled.
The way his first cry sounded. The way I felt anxious to meet him. And when I looked into his eyes for the first time, I knew that there was nothing about this journey that I wanted to forget.
Now that I am a mother, moments and memories are something that I crave more and more. Like a good glass of wine, a good snapshot of my son, clapping his hands for the first time. A video of him laughing so hard he can barely breathe because my husband made a fart noise. I find myself doing a delicate dance of whipping out my phone to capture every single adorable thing that my son does, and spending time on my hands and knees, on the floor at his level, laughing, playing, babbling, looking at him in awe. Taking time to see things from where he sees them.
I once was a childless person, who would just automatically scroll past my parent friends’ posts and pictures of their children, giving them a mindless, automatic “like.” Breaking news, little so and so did this for the first time. Thumbs up, because. . .. Babies.
Now, a quick scroll of “on this day,” or my news feed, or even as far back as photos in my iPhone will go, offer a bit of an escape for me. In this time and space, there are plenty of things that I have no control over, and many things that I’m sure I wouldn’t mind forgetting. Yet, I want to focus on my obsession with looking in on my life. I want to take in all the moments, sights, smells, sounds, thoughts, triumphs, failures. I need to capture them, file them away in the safest recesses of my memory while I still can. — WPBloomberg