Unreliable Witness

My sister does a hilarious impression of my mother dancing. There's something about the way she moves her shoulders and lifts her knees that brings Mom back into the room, or, in this particular instance, onto a boat in the Gulf of Mexico. We were anchored offshore, enjoying a picnic lunch and bobbing along with the jaunty waves, when the three of us began our customary excavation of childhood memories. My sister danced, my brother and I laughed, and before long we were revisiting the indignities of childhood, like waiting for the word from Mom before we could break out of our rooms for present opening on Christmas morning—a hard and fast rule we were still rolling our eyes about decades later.

It was Sibling Day, an annual tradition I'd proposed a few years after our mom had died. I wanted one day each year reserved for the three of us. No spouses, no children, no competing obligations beyond the ones we could reasonably ignore. We'd spent our childhood sharing a house, two parents, and the daily business of being a family, but adulthood had carried us into separate lives where we weren't making many memories together anymore. With Mom gone, I felt an urgency to change that. I wanted us to make new memories together, not just revel in the old ones.

My brother and sister agreed, and we began taking turns planning our annual adventures. We've escaped from locked rooms, consulted psychics, painted pictures, hung with manatees, and visited the famous mermaids at Weeki Wachee. I have no idea how many families can claim both psychic readings and mermaids as part of their ongoing sibling time, but we've made it work.

And while we always have a wonderful time accumulating new memories, we inevitably find ourselves wandering back into the old ones. There's something irresistible about sitting with people who remember your childhood, particularly when they're willing to corroborate your complaints about it. But the particular gift in having siblings is that they're the only people who know your parents the way you do.

Or so I thought.

After a round of stories and laughs and good-hearted teasing of our parents at their best and worst, I felt compelled to offer a more generous assessment of our upbringing.

"You know, one of the things I appreciate about Mom and Pop is how they always encouraged our learning," I said. "Even when we went on family vacations, we were always learning something! Like going on tours of factories or historic places. I know it wasn't always the most exciting thing, but I really think it instilled in us curiosity and a hunger to always learn."

My brother, who's eight years older than I am, looked at me with an expression somewhere between disbelief and delight.

"You think that's why we went on those tours, Melinda?"

"Yeah. Of course."

He burst out laughing.

"Um, no. We did those things because they were FREE! They were two schoolteachers with three kids. They had to find ways to entertain us when we were on vacation, so they always looked for free things wherever we went!"

I stared at him. Free? For nearly fifty years, I'd believed my parents were so devoted to cultivating curiosity that even our family vacations were carefully planned educational adventures. In my mind, they'd chosen destinations to broaden our horizons, deepen our appreciation of history, and perhaps inspire a lifelong interest in industrial manufacturing. And now my brother was suggesting that the deciding factor had been the admission price?

I was a little crestfallen and felt foolish for having assigned such noble intentions to what might have been a perfectly ordinary exercise in household economics.

But the thing is… I still believe my version of the story. My parents were teachers in their classrooms and everywhere else. They loved learning and encouraged us to be curious about the world. Even if money was tight, they could have spent our vacations lounging beside a hotel pool or leaving us to entertain ourselves in front of a TV. Instead, they took us places where we encountered new people, unfamiliar ideas, and the occasional industrial process. Surely both things could be true. They wanted us to learn, and they wanted to do it for free.

But what stayed with me wasn't the revelation about our parents. It was what the conversation revealed about my brother and me.

We had taken the same vacations. Piled into the same car, endured the same miles, toured the same factories, and listened to the same parental commentary. Yet he'd come away with a different understanding of what our parents were doing. Where I saw an educational philosophy, he saw a financial strategy. Neither interpretation struck me as unreasonable, but I was fascinated that we'd managed to carry them around for decades without discovering the difference.

I began wondering what else my brother had seen that I hadn't. What else did we believe about the same experiences?

Eight years is a considerable distance between children, especially when one is approaching adulthood and the other is still young enough to regard her parents as the final authorities on nearly everything. When I was eight, my brother was sixteen. I was probably more concerned with whether there would be dessert after dinner than with how much dinner cost. He was old enough to recognize the arithmetic of raising three children on two teachers' salaries. Perhaps he'd overheard conversations about money or noticed the careful calculations behind decisions that appeared effortless to me. Perhaps he'd simply reached an age when he understood that adults, even our own parents, were making things up as they went along. I don't know.

What I do know is that I could afford to mythologize our parents. I wondered whether he could.

Families have a peculiar way of assigning us our characters early in life. The responsible one. The sensitive one. The troublemaker. The baby. We develop reputations before we have much say in the matter, and sometimes those descriptions follow us into middle age, long after we've acquired mortgages, reading glasses, and opinions about cholesterol. I wonder how often we continue to see one another through those childhood assignments, interpreting a sibling's behavior according to a story we've been telling about them since they were ten.

And what of the stories we tell about our parents? A father is remembered as strict by one child and protective by another. A mother is generous or extravagant, depending on who recalls the purchase. One child remembers a house full of laughter while another remembers the arguments that came afterward. These aren't necessarily competing versions of the facts. Sometimes they're different accounts of what it felt like to be there.

We tend to believe that being present for an experience gives us some authority over its telling. We were there, after all. We saw what happened. We heard what was said. But we were also there as ourselves, bringing our ages, temperaments, fears, desires, and expectations into the experience. We noticed what mattered to us, overlooked what didn't, and later arranged those observations into something that made sense of our lives.

I wonder how much of a memory belongs to the event and how much belongs to the person remembering it.

I think about the conversation on the boat and realize that I never asked my brother why he understood those vacations as he did. I was too busy being astonished. I wish I'd been a little more curious about what he remembered, whether he'd ever thought about the educational value of our excursions, and what else he might have noticed about our parents when I was still happily accepting the world they presented to me.

I also wonder what he made of my interpretation. Was he surprised that I'd never considered the money? Did he recognize the little sister he'd known all his life, still inclined to find something grand in the ordinary? Or had he simply made a funny observation and moved on, unaware that I would be contemplating it years later?

There's something worth examining in our certainty about the people we know best. We interrupt their stories to correct the details, remind them how things really happened, or finish their sentences because we've heard them so many times. We can become so familiar with our family stories that we forget each person has been living a separate life inside the shared one. Even the memories we hold in common may have traveled very different distances to reach us.

I began Sibling Day because I wanted my brother and sister and me to make new memories together. I hadn't considered that those new experiences might also give us opportunities to discover something about the old ones, or about the people who'd been there with us.

I still remember our family vacations as adventures in learning. I imagine my brother remembers them as evidence of our parents' considerable resourcefulness. If Mom and Pop were here to settle the matter, I suspect they'd tell us that we were both right, then remind us how lucky we were to have gone anywhere at all.

But I'd like to think that if we were sitting together again, anchored somewhere in the Gulf with a picnic lunch between us, I'd ask my brother a few more questions before deciding what his story meant.

After all, we've already spent a lifetime collecting family stories. I'm beginning to suspect we haven't heard all of them yet.