Falsified Memories, but Not Scars

When I talk about having kids in the future, I always find myself telling people: “I want to have a boy first, so he can always watch out for his little sister,” even though that was almost never the case in my own childhood. You can follow the breadcrumb-trail left at the scene of each of my devastating injuries and it would lead you to my two older brothers, who would be laughing at how “weird” I looked with blood dripping through my teeth from the most recent head injury that they played a major role in.

When my mother tells me stories about my childhood, she laughs at the time that I was thrown from the handlebars of my older brother’s four-wheeler, only to have him run over my arm moments later and get rushed to the hospital for a cast. As she chuckles, she points to a picture in one of her hundred scrapbooks, of me holding my baby sister, sporting a bright neon-green arm-cast. She slaps her knee as she remembers the time the hotel pool was dyed red with my blood when my brother tried to push me into the pool and he wasn't strong enough to push my body weight past the edge, where my chin tried to catch my weight on the cement. Her laughter masks the fear she must have felt in those moments, and I sit in front of her, unblinking, and soak up every line in her stories as she tries to alter my memory.

The stories always have slight variation to them, though I did not notice that until my senior year of high school. I began taking college level psychology classes and learned about falsified memories and how your recollection of a memory changes, or refines it, each time you try and recall it. She constantly tells me these stories about my siblings and I before the divorce, but I sense things were not how she imagined. After my parents split, my brothers began to take care of me in ways I did not even think they were capable of beforehand. My pizza-faced brothers became adults in front of the court as they fought to keep our family together. So then why would they be smiling from the top-bunk as I lay a few yards below, in a pool of my own blood, with a cracked skull from the edge of a toy box at the end of the bed? I think my mother used to tell us those stories in that way as a self-fulfilling prophecy, so my siblings and I can be better to one another than we used to be.