Muscle Memory

At my most recent OBGYN appointment, I told my doctor I was pretty certain I was suffering from BCS. He looked at me with a quizzical gaze. "You know," I continued, "Broken Crotch Syndrome." His brow furrowed. I wondered if I had embarrassed him by exposing his lack of medical nomenclature. Then he smiled and said, "Ah, pain in your pelvis?"

I nodded.

When he asked me to further explain the discomfort, I told him to, first, not use the word "discomfort"and second, to understand that the pain oscillated between sharp and intense to dull and throbbing. I was pretty sure the damn thing was broken.

"Totally normal," he said with a swat of the hand. "And I assure you, it isn't broken."

I sighed heavily, clearly not satisfied with his explanation for why walking up stairs felt like being hit repeatedly in my lady parts with a sack of hot nickels.

"Your body has been through this before," he tried explaining further. "So it's preparing itself."

I stared at him blankly.

"It's a simple case of muscle memory." He declared with finality.

I suppose my doctor might have a point. My body has been through a pregnancy once before. And a birth. And I know that muscles, do in fact, retain memory of processes or activities they have experienced before. My pelvis was remembering, perhaps quite vividly, how lengthy and difficult of a labor and delivery it was put through. And so, in the interest of self preservation, my vagina was holding up her hands like a stranger was pointing a gun. She was surrendering.

The great thing about my pelvis remembering everything about the birthing process, is that my mind was only remembering certain aspects of it. Like all good defense mechanisms available to humans, the ability to erase traumatic experiences, sad moments or truly painful episodes from one's memory is the strongest. Medical research will tell us that physical pain has no memory. I remember the birth of my first child as one of the more painful experiences of my life. But I can't exactly recall the feeling of it. I just remember it was painful. And so, when women get past the trauma of childbirth (and new motherhood) they actually, over time, forget the pain of it all. This is the only reason second-born children even exist.

But then, memory can work overtime to hold on to other aspects of our lives. Even if the memory is retained for the wrong reason.

One of my most vivid memories from childhood was watching the wedding of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, in the early hours of the morning, while vacationing with my family. I remember sitting on the soft green carpet in front of the television in our hotel room while my mother sat on the edge of one of the beds, daubing her eyes with tissues. My sister and brother played cards at the small table in the room and my father was sleeping soundly in the other bed. I remember the intricate details of the wedding dress. I remember the floral pattern on the bedspreads. I remember the soft rumble of my father's snore.

Only when I was much older did I discover that Diana's wedding to Charles happened two years before I was ever born. 

Psychologists call this "confabulation", or "false memories." I created and solidified an extremely strong memory in my mind simply by hearing the retelling of family stories that took place before I was born.

My fondest and strongest memories from childhood--ones not blocked from trauma, or fabricated from proximity--are connected to my unique and beautiful friendship to my best friend, Kate. Having met at the age of three--when most experts agree we begin to retain memories--she exists in most every major memory of my childhood. My strongest memory is a relationship.

If you ask my husband what his strongest memories from childhood are, he would say books. Specifically comic books. When he was very young, his mother bought him a stack of comic books as a way to get him interested in reading. Her trick worked so well that Jim was able to read before kindergarten and is, still to this day, intensely drawn to comic book mythology.

By realizing the pivotal aspects of our childhood memories, my husband and I can easily see how our minds function differently from each other in adulthood. I can recall specifics of moments dating back to three years of age. I never forget a face. Or a piece of clothing. Or a line of dialogue that was spoken to me years ago. I remember how people stood when they expressed an emotion to me. I remember eye shadow color. I remember emotions. I remember conversations. Facial features. Voices. Hands. It's so powerful that the moment an unknown actor appears on screen, I can instantly remember a different color shirt the actor was wearing in a different role, think back to what he was saying in that other role and let my mind work around the memory until I declare that was the guy in the cat food commercial six years ago.

But my memory stops at the written word. I can read something over and over and over and it's like an egg on Teflon. The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite books, but I have to reread it frequently, and when I do, I'm shocked when Myrtle Wilson is run over by the car. Every single time.

Jim, on the other hand, can remember every word he's ever read. If his eyes skimmed it once, it's in his head forever. Not only can he remember what he's read, but what year he read it in, and in which periodical he discovered it. This is why he was extremely successful in school and college and scored almost perfect on the SATs and the GRE. His vocabulary is endless. His grasp of the complexities of the Middle East and all the leaders' names (spelled correctly) is astonishing. If he read it in a newspaper, magazine or text book, it's his for life.

But his total recall stops at details surrounding personal interactions. He struggles to remember specifics of conversations. The number of times I've verbally told him an important piece of information, only to have him ask for the details again the next day, are countless. But I'd never call him forgetful. Besides, if I really want him to remember something, I know to just send him an email.

Between our two memories, Jim's is seemingly more useful. He gets more conventional recognition out of retaining facts, words, dates, and events than I get out of recalling feelings, emotions, experiences and faces. But when we allow our memories to work together, we can fully round out an experience.

A few months back, at my husband's company Christmas party, we walked into the room to find a crowd of his coworkers and their spouses. I immediately recognized every single person and was able to call them all by names and ask them how they were feeling about the upcoming milestone their child was approaching, which they had spoken of with such vivid emotion last Christmas. And when a coworker brought up the football game he was so excited about, my husband jumped in with all the backlogged knowledge he has stored about the sports team's statistics he'd been reading about in the paper.

It's not quite A Beautiful Mind, or accurately and quickly counting toothpicks, but it is the summation of our relationship.

So as we are fast approaching the birth of our second child, we find our muscles remembering vastly different moments from the same experience. As usual, my memory is completely physical, experiential and emotional. My body is reacting strongly to its own memory. My pelvis is assuming the position. My heart is pulsing with excitement. My gut is tightening with fear. Jim's focused on the specifics. He's recounting all the pamphlets he had read in the hospital. He's recalling the specifics of how we check in at Labor and Delivery. He's remembering how many doses of pain medicines were most effective during my recovery.

And when I see how our memories retain different aspects of the same experience, I realize how much our memories are different simply because we observe life in different ways. Jim's always been drawn to details, complexities, specifics. I've always been drawn to emotions, conversations, intentions. And so perhaps it's natural for people to retain only those aspects of life that entice them the most.

Which is why I've enjoyed this portion of our marriage, the portion with children, more than any other time in our relationship. Because never before have we both been so incredibly enticed by the same thing.

Even if we remember each moment in different ways. Becoming parents together is the most challenging, most life-altering, most rewarding experience either of us has ever had. I can recall and mimic the exact octave of our child's most joyous laugh. I can accurately draw her birthmark from memory. I remember the exact temperature of her skin at birth. Jim can recall every daily take home sheet that recounted what she did and ate at school on a specific day. He knows every book he's ever read to her by heart. He remembers what she weighed at every doctor's visit in the first year. 

And we try to concentrate on these memories. Because my hammer-pelted crotch is reminding me of all the painful memories we also have with our child. Memories at which we both still wince. The pain. The exhaustion. The screaming cries of our child. Postpartum. Ear infections. Shots. Grieving our simpler lives. But memory is the mirror of life. It reflects the good with the bad.

And our life changes every day. Every day is a new memory, and soon, we will have another child to fill our minds with even more. So as life races on, my husband and I have promised to put our heads together.

So we won't forget to remember it all.







photo credit: www.dailymail.co.uk