I have an adorable high school son worth ten daughters. He liked to go to sleep in my arms and didn’t ever want to leave my side when he was a little boy. But before I knew, he has grown so tall that now I have to look up at him. Whenever I see him who has grown tall, I’m proud but sad on the other hand because soon he will not need my help any longer.
Perhaps this could be the reason I got a strange habit of asking my son whether he remembers his childhood. When he walks up to me, I remember him crawling up to me with his diaper on; when he’s talking, sitting beside me, I remember him babbling.
“My son, remember? When you were little, you used to play right beside me when I was cooking.”
I asked my son when he was drinking water in the kitchen, and I asked him again when I was playing the piano.
“When you were little, you used to tell me that you got powered up when I played your favorite song, do you remember?”
One day, I was mopping the floor, kneeling down, and my son saw me and said, “Mom, if you clean like that, your joint won’t last long. You need to change your posture.”
“Thanks, son. Now you’ve grown enough to think of your mom. You used to ride on my back the whole time when I was cleaning like this, remember?”
After marriage, the experience of giving birth was a series of surprise and gratitude. I didn’t want to lose any moment, so I always had a camera and a voice recorder in my hand since I had my baby in my arms.
My two baby books have details of what I thought and what happened from the moment I felt fetal movement to his first birthday. And I also have his nails and hairs that I’d cut off for the first time stuck on the book. That is not all. I even saved ten tapes of his babbling, first laugh, crying, and exclaiming recorded.
There are two reasons for saving these: When my son becomes an adult, I wanted to give him a special present; and before that, when he goes through puberty and meets hardship, I wanted him to overcome by realizing how much his mom and dad loved and cared about him.
I stopped writing a diary but even after that, I recorded every moment of my child, brick by brick, in my both eyes and heart. However, unlike me, my son seemed to have almost no memories of his childhood. A few days ago, our family gathered and had dinner. Our talk drifted to the favorite dish he used to like.
“You used to love that dish, don’t you remember? You don’t seem to like it anymore. It was your favorite . . .”
“Actually, I can’t remember it well . . . and other things, either.”
“I remember the day you moved in my womb for the first time, the day you were born, and so many other things that happened while you were growing up, but how come I’m the only one who has these memories?”
It’s natural to lose memories as time passes by, but I was a little disappointed.
Deep in thought, my eyes prickled with tears; I was reminded of Heavenly Mother who could be hurt at my lost memory of heaven just like my son didn’t remember his childhood.
Every time Mother faces her children, She may be reminded of the happy moments She had in the kingdom of heaven. And just as I ask my son, She may want to ask us whether we remember that beautiful and happy moments we had in heaven.
Now that I’ve recaptured a glimpse of heaven’s memory, with tears, I’m grasping Mother’s clothes, promising myself that I won’t ever leave Her again. Mother, thank You for opening my eyes to see my home—not the place of lost memories but the heavenly home where I will return.