It’s not even that my mom forgets things that happened many years ago, but the fact that she does not have real memories at all, but rather memories of the memories. She often combines several past events in one, or forgets the seqence of event entirely, like for example not remembering whether my children were born in the US or not. A couple of months ago she said that “I never told her anything about my first husband,” and would I tell her something about him, like what was his name, and who he was, and when we got married, and where he is now. I was more than shocked (I believe I blogged about it), but wrote everything down for her. For some reason, she seemed unhappy with what I wrote.
About two weeks ago, when she wanted to talk with me about her diaries, she mentioned that she found one of them, and she didn’t remember that she wrote it. I recognized the notebook when I saw it: that was the one I didn’t ever want to see again. She opened it and ask whether I remember how I yelled at her, and read one paragraph aloud. I told her that I indeed remembered. I didn’t ask here whether she remembered why did I yell at her, because she clearly didn’t. Then she said that she would type all the texts from this notebook on her computer (which was not a bad idea at all; she already did it with some of her diaries). And then she said that she was not going to change anything in her words, although now she thinks that she was wrong regarding “what she wrote about me” because “I am the best daughter ever.” To be honest, that was a tryly remarkable statement, because I would never imagine that she could take her words back, so I really wanted to aknowledge it.
Unfortunately, immediately after she said this, she added “as I mentioned, you never told me anything about your first husband, so I don’t know… it’s not about your Boris, is it?” I told her that it was indeed “about my Boris,” but she didn’t believe me. Now, adding two and two, I am beginning to think that she was reading her diaries, and could not imagine that she wrote all these horrible things about Boris and decidede I was married to someone else. Igor’s dad, apparently, had completely disappeared from her memories.
Hettie's Reflections 