Repository 236: Pockets
Catherine Haley Epstein, Pocket, oil on wood
We humans with our pockets, containers, Tupperware, jars, storage boxes, shelves, file cabinets. No one reading this is immune to the saving nature of our species. We save therefore we are. To what degree is saving beneficial, and to what degree is it wasteful and more dangerously nostalgic. I saved every letter from my paternal grandmother that she sent to me in college. Pre-email and texting, we had a letter correspondence of over a four year period that would rival the diaries of a very bored and confused college student seeking guidance from a beautifully salty, no edit button grandma. Growing up my mother would repeatedly tell my grandma as she started to tell stories “Not now Margaret, the kids don’t need to hear that.” Well I heard it all in letters in college, and it was funny, sweet and not at all threatening. When I found the pile that I saved, over 20 yeras later, I had no problem recycling the paper to the world and letting it go. I’ve always been a pro at letting things go.
For me jobs have moved tightly and swiftly - I’ve rarely held onto the nostalgia or the prestige of a job or experience. Curiosity motors me for better or for worse. As I write now I have teenagers, three total, kings and queen of curiosity. One becomes an adult tomorrow, one who is about to get his license, and one who just entered the drum beat and darkness of adolescence. Developmentally adolescents are designed to push their family away, something that in my training and study I know is deeply normal. They are forgetting machines. The difficult piece is being both a forgetting machine myself, and having the most difficult time forgetting the child, the connection and the love I feel deeply for them all. I know my love will be replaced to a degree by a partner, for this I am hopeful.
That said, I worry for my children and their peers - they move very fast in forgetting without proper curation and long thinking. Pockets we keep are best kept for holding gentle moments, gentle relationships, gentle feelings. My dear children are over-exposed to “life” that they have had no time to create pockets. I am grieving deeply for this.