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edenfallingMemory is a funny thing.
Vaguely apropos of a discussion I've been following on Tumblr, I asked Vicky tonight if she remembered when we switched from calling our parents Mommy and Daddy to calling them Mom and Dad. I was fairly sure it happened sometime between my eight and tenth birthdays, but I couldn't pin it down more specifically. Vicky was slightly more definite, and said she thought it happened in the fall of her first grade year, which would make her six and me nine. So far, all in agreement.
But what we remember around that incident is radically different. I remember that shortly before we made that choice, Mom told us a story about how one of her brothers (our Uncle Charles) decided that their family should switch to calling their parents Mom and Dad because it sounded much more mature (and/or cool). Vicky does not remember that. What she remembers is the conversation in which we made our decision, which happened at night, at my instigation, while we were ostensibly 'sleeping' in our bunk beds. I do not remember that.
And it occurred to me that I hardly remember anything about the two years or so that we shared a bedroom. I remember telling Vicky bedtime stories. I have a sort of kinesthetic memory of climbing the ladder to the top bed (which, as elder sister, I'd naturally claimed). I remember that we used to sneak downstairs and snitch food from the pantry after our parents went to bed; sometimes this was cookies, but equally often it was just handfuls of Cheerios or similarly unsweetened cereal. And that is pretty much it. For two years.
I think this is because I still subconsciously regarded 'our' bedroom for those years as Vicky's room rather than my own room. I have some relatively strong memories of my bedroom from when we first moved into that house. (I was four.) I have lots of strong memories of my bedroom from after the bunk bed experiment ended. But those two years in between are awfully vague on that front.
And that reminded me that our bedroom situation was always a little weird. My childhood home (which is still my parents' house even though it's stupidly large for two people plus one small dog) did not have a great layout for equitable bedroom allocation. The front of the house had three windows, which meant one of the two rooms along that wall was twice the size of the other. And the layout of the other upstairs rooms meant that the space comparable to the bigger front room was split into two smallish rooms, one of which was inaccessible except through the other and which stood over an unenclosed back porch and therefore tended to be absolutely freezing in the winter. That room was our old guest room for a long time. The room it was accessed through was Dad's study.
So I had the big front room, Vicky had the small front room, and we both knew that this was fundamentally unfair. Our parents tried various workarounds, but putting Vicky's dresser in my room was a recipe for disaster because it turned my space into a semi-public space and made some of her possessions feel semi-public even while her actual space remained private. Moving her dresser into the hallway fixed the problem with my room but continued the problem of Vicky's stuff being out of her direct control. Having us share a the small room as a bedroom and the large room as a playroom solved the fairness issue, but also meant that neither of us had anywhere to properly get away from each other when we were fighting or trying to do homework without distractions. Mom and Dad let Vicky repaint her closet when she was eleven-ish, as a way to assert some additional control over her restricted space, but that was a stopgap measure at best.
When Vicky was halfway through high school, our parents finally got the downstairs sunroom fixed up enough that Dad could use it as a study, and we swapped things around such that Vicky got the former guest room and study as her joint 'room,' and her old room became the new guest room. Then that fell apart because she discovered both her new rooms were infested by mildew that had escaped notice because Dad was relatively insensitive to it. *headdesk* (I am a little unclear about what happened after that, because I was in the process of accidentally-on-purpose moving permanently to Ithaca.)
I sometimes wonder if Vicky's childhood penchant for stealing my jewelry and borrowing my books and clothes without asking was related to the way I generally had more space than she did. I also wonder if I would have been so ferocious about defending that space -- I spent a lot of time throwing her out of my room, often literally -- if I hadn't been reacting to the way that she tended to use 'but I need to get such-and-such thing of mine and it's in your room, so you can't kick me out!' as an excuse to come bug me about unrelated things when I wanted to be alone.
...
I think I had more of a point when I started writing this, but oh well.
In summary, memory is weird, sibling relationships are weird, personal space is weird, and I am glad that Vicky and I learned how NOT to have screaming knock-down fights as we got older. We were always very close, but over the years we consciously chose to like each other as well as love each other. And I am very grateful for that.
(I am also grateful for our parents, who were not perfect -- nobody is -- but who I think did a pretty good job all things considered.)
Vaguely apropos of a discussion I've been following on Tumblr, I asked Vicky tonight if she remembered when we switched from calling our parents Mommy and Daddy to calling them Mom and Dad. I was fairly sure it happened sometime between my eight and tenth birthdays, but I couldn't pin it down more specifically. Vicky was slightly more definite, and said she thought it happened in the fall of her first grade year, which would make her six and me nine. So far, all in agreement.
But what we remember around that incident is radically different. I remember that shortly before we made that choice, Mom told us a story about how one of her brothers (our Uncle Charles) decided that their family should switch to calling their parents Mom and Dad because it sounded much more mature (and/or cool). Vicky does not remember that. What she remembers is the conversation in which we made our decision, which happened at night, at my instigation, while we were ostensibly 'sleeping' in our bunk beds. I do not remember that.
And it occurred to me that I hardly remember anything about the two years or so that we shared a bedroom. I remember telling Vicky bedtime stories. I have a sort of kinesthetic memory of climbing the ladder to the top bed (which, as elder sister, I'd naturally claimed). I remember that we used to sneak downstairs and snitch food from the pantry after our parents went to bed; sometimes this was cookies, but equally often it was just handfuls of Cheerios or similarly unsweetened cereal. And that is pretty much it. For two years.
I think this is because I still subconsciously regarded 'our' bedroom for those years as Vicky's room rather than my own room. I have some relatively strong memories of my bedroom from when we first moved into that house. (I was four.) I have lots of strong memories of my bedroom from after the bunk bed experiment ended. But those two years in between are awfully vague on that front.
And that reminded me that our bedroom situation was always a little weird. My childhood home (which is still my parents' house even though it's stupidly large for two people plus one small dog) did not have a great layout for equitable bedroom allocation. The front of the house had three windows, which meant one of the two rooms along that wall was twice the size of the other. And the layout of the other upstairs rooms meant that the space comparable to the bigger front room was split into two smallish rooms, one of which was inaccessible except through the other and which stood over an unenclosed back porch and therefore tended to be absolutely freezing in the winter. That room was our old guest room for a long time. The room it was accessed through was Dad's study.
So I had the big front room, Vicky had the small front room, and we both knew that this was fundamentally unfair. Our parents tried various workarounds, but putting Vicky's dresser in my room was a recipe for disaster because it turned my space into a semi-public space and made some of her possessions feel semi-public even while her actual space remained private. Moving her dresser into the hallway fixed the problem with my room but continued the problem of Vicky's stuff being out of her direct control. Having us share a the small room as a bedroom and the large room as a playroom solved the fairness issue, but also meant that neither of us had anywhere to properly get away from each other when we were fighting or trying to do homework without distractions. Mom and Dad let Vicky repaint her closet when she was eleven-ish, as a way to assert some additional control over her restricted space, but that was a stopgap measure at best.
When Vicky was halfway through high school, our parents finally got the downstairs sunroom fixed up enough that Dad could use it as a study, and we swapped things around such that Vicky got the former guest room and study as her joint 'room,' and her old room became the new guest room. Then that fell apart because she discovered both her new rooms were infested by mildew that had escaped notice because Dad was relatively insensitive to it. *headdesk* (I am a little unclear about what happened after that, because I was in the process of accidentally-on-purpose moving permanently to Ithaca.)
I sometimes wonder if Vicky's childhood penchant for stealing my jewelry and borrowing my books and clothes without asking was related to the way I generally had more space than she did. I also wonder if I would have been so ferocious about defending that space -- I spent a lot of time throwing her out of my room, often literally -- if I hadn't been reacting to the way that she tended to use 'but I need to get such-and-such thing of mine and it's in your room, so you can't kick me out!' as an excuse to come bug me about unrelated things when I wanted to be alone.
...
I think I had more of a point when I started writing this, but oh well.
In summary, memory is weird, sibling relationships are weird, personal space is weird, and I am glad that Vicky and I learned how NOT to have screaming knock-down fights as we got older. We were always very close, but over the years we consciously chose to like each other as well as love each other. And I am very grateful for that.
(I am also grateful for our parents, who were not perfect -- nobody is -- but who I think did a pretty good job all things considered.)
