Déjà vu : a feeling of recollection, a common intuitive experience, derived from the French meaning “already seen.”
Have you ever had a moment that you feel you’ve lived before?
I have…
And not just those weird random moments that pop up when you least expect them and you feel like “I’ve been here before” …
I’ve had that too, but I’m talking about a different kind of déjà vu, I’m talking about the return of a feeling brought on by the experience of someone else.
As a mother, I most often experience those feelings through the faces of my children.
Their pride, when they’ve made good grades or created something beautiful …
Their disappointment, when life doesn’t go as they expected …
Their simple excitement, when Mommy loses her mind and buys boxed Mac n cheese or sugary cereal …
Sadness with loss, Joy with positive gain, Frustration with difficulties not easily repaired.
Being a mother, is like walking down a familiar street, only the storefronts have changed and there’s lead in my boots – like I know where I need to go, but things are different and navigating is somehow harder. The price I pay for a wrong turn seems more costly now too.
Being a mother is like Déjà vu … only instead of living it, I’m watching it backwards, from inside a mirror.
But then again, you really don’t need to be a mother to recognize a felt experience through another human being. You just need to make the effort.
Holding on to memories is something that comes easily to me. Sometimes, it serves me well, filling my mind with pleasant thoughts and moments I like to revisit. And other times, my memories haunt me like a bad dream. Either way, when I take a moment, I can feel those memories as if I were there again. Whether they soothe and comfort or insight anger and anxiety, my past has left me with both good feelings and bad, beautiful tradition and reason to change. And when my children find those same feelings, watching them navigate them, brings me right back.
I remember the excitement and anticipation of cracking open a new board game and sitting down to play with my family. I remember how special it felt when an adult would play with us. My Dad was really good at playing games with us. We had a bunch of really cool board games that you can’t even find anymore. He even made a few himself. He taught us how to play cards too-poker and spades. I was so young when we started that my little fingers couldn’t even hold my whole hand. So he’d accommodate me by letting me sit at the bench that ran along the back of the table by myself so that I could lay my cards down there. We’d play for hours. And we continued to do so until we were grown.
I can feel that sense of specialness in the sly smiles of my children and that subtle little butt-wiggle that they do when they settle into their seats, about to do something fun. And it’s my own recollection of that excitement that energizes me when I really just want to sit and relax. Feeling their excitement reminds me of how good it feels to anticipate fun.
I remember the feeling of disappointment, holding that box and asking someone to play or getting an invite and asking for a ride and being told “No, I’m in the middle of something right now”, or, “I need time to myself right now.” I wasn’t a child who got invited out a whole lot, so those opportunities to play, those invitations to socialize felt like gold to me. And I remember that rejection made me feel not important. After lots of moments of not feeling important, that disappointment began to transform into burning resentment.
So when my children come to me and ask to play or ask for a ride, while it can’t always be “Yes” at that very moment, I do try to find a way; because I recognize that familiar eagerness in their eyes and the importance of participating in something that is meaningful to them. And when my ‘tired mom-self’ remembers her ‘wanting to belong child-self’, I usually find a way to make it happen. Between the sweetness of the play and the bitterness of the “No, Mom needs some time to herself,” I choose the sweetness, because as clear as I remember the joy, I also remember the pain.
I’ve experienced more loss in my life than I even care to tally. And those losses have been equally spread throughout my years. But it’s the losses I experienced as a youth, that still leave the deepest scars. Sometimes adults become very self-consumed when they are in grief and they forget that children too, grieve. Adults have it hard because they have to function and produce despite their hardships. But children have it hard too, because they don’t have mature counterparts to guide them through their grief. They don’t get flowers from co-workers or friends that call if they need to talk, and even if they did, they often don’t have the maturity to take advantage of that gift. Be it the death of a person or the death of a relationship, children often feel lost when there is a loss. I know I did- when we lost my uncle, my brother, our home, when my parents divorced, when my family was split and living in different houses…the list continues. Great-grandparents and extended family members were too far down the list to even make the cut for my childhood losses.
My children’s most significant loss was the death of their great-grandmother. I saw my daughter’s sadness the most in her drawings and her unpredictable outbursts. When I’d try to talk to her face-to-face, she could never open up. And that longing to be acknowledged, yet uncomfortable reluctance to be vulnerable, felt familiar to me. So I bought her walkie-talkies and strapped one to my pants. And I’ll be damned if in the middle of my household chores, a little voice hiding in her closet didn’t come through the speaker, “Mommy, I miss Mimi.” Like, déjà vu but backwards … cuz when I was hiding in my closet, I didn’t have a walkie-talkie or someone who I thought could listen.
I remember the angst in not having birthday parties, or even friends over, because it was “too expensive” and “too stressful”. That angst and my natural drive to create fellowship as well as creative expression, drives me to spend weeks creating the most intricate, thematic parties I could dream up. And has allowed my home to become the “hub” for children to hang-out at. Because I hated feeling alone.
Not déjà vu, but running from it maybe?
But while we didn’t have much in the way of birthday parties, my Mom did bake our birthday cake every year. We weren’t allowed in the kitchen while she was preparing it, to preserve the element of surprise. And when I close my eyes, I can still see the darkened room and the lighted candles and I can feel that satisfying and warm sense of pride and love that came with watching my Mom carry her creation from the kitchen- a cake that I knew she had spent hours making just for me.
On busy birthdays, my husband will often suggest, “Why don’t you just buy a cake this year?” … “I can’t”, I say. I can buy the decorations and the goody bags and the even the cookies, but not the cake. Because it’s the same pride and love blazing in my children’s eyes when they see me enter the room with their cake and lighted candles that drives me to create, year after year. And together we suck the icing off the candles like the sweet taste of déjà vu.
When my daughter comes running to me, crying about a boy… I feel that sharp, stabbing pain that comes with young love. And I try to say to her, what I wished someone had told me. Maybe it would have saved me?…Or maybe it’s just me, trying to soothe my own ache…rub away my own déjà vu.
And when she comes home with ridiculously long fake nails, that look like claws, or way too much make-up, it takes a minute longer for the surprise to wear off and the old remembered feelings to kick in, but eventually they do. And I feel what it’s like to try to bridge that gap between being a girl and a woman, when so much of your sense of worth is tied to your looks. Life as a teenager was all about selfish excess, I remember.
When my son is being bullied, ’cause he’s small or not tough enough, the hateful rejection from the rich, snobby-ass kids in my childhood school, comes searing back like a big ‘ol “You’re not good enough” smack in the face. And after I bang out the e-mail to the principle, I wipe away that single, not-good-enough tear from my own eye, along with his. That painful sting of déjà vu.
It’s the squirmy, uncomfortable feeling of sex education that I saw in my own babes that made me want to squirm too, but also drove me to run in a different direction. And instead of an awkward, one way, face to face instructional, we took a really long and animated walk in which my arms became fallopian tubes and ejaculation looked like a rocket ship and consent and pleasure carried just as much weight as procreation. Another episode of déjà vu, dodged.
I know that I’m a good Mom, these times I have done well. But there are many more times that I struggle to empathize with my children’s hardships, because their lives are so very different than mine was. The old “You kids don’t even know “hard!” tends to come out more than I’d like. Their stressors, their fears are on such a different scale than mine were at their ages. And it’s hard not to roll my eyes when they’re crying about a luxury that I wouldn’t have even dreamed of.
But if I take a moment and I try to remember, those old memories packed with old feelings, come rushing back all over again. And it’s those emotion-filled memories that have both fueled me to continue loved traditions and practices and to change the things that hurt me; using my history to learn and create caution instead of repetition and taking every opportunity I can to gain perspective.
But am I too accommodating? Am I making them too soft? Are household chores, rules with consequences and hard-knocks at school enough to prepare them for life, if Mommy is always there to wipe their tears and home is always secure. These are the thoughts that people who have grown up hard and fast have.
Despite my concerns, frustrations and episodes of apathy, I am reminded that this is exactly the life I wanted for them. This is what I worked for. My life experiences gave me the wisdom and the inertia to make this journey, right here, like this, so that they would have a different life. And life is hard enough, home doesn’t have to be.
According to Psychology today, déjà vu “involves having that feeling of knowing in a situation in which you are experiencing something totally new.” My children’s lives are something new. They are not mine. My recollections, my feelings, those may feel like something lived before, but what’s happening right now, is totally new. Déjà vu can’t claim that. Despite both the sweet similarities and the traumatic flash-backs, despite genetics and behavioral cycles, this life is new. And there’s something about that, that lessens the amounts of lead in my boots.
With a whole lot of hard work, and a little luck…I’m living a fucking fairytale…a slightly fractured, little bit bumpy, imperfectly perfect tale…but a fairytale nonetheless. And there’s nothing déjà vu about that…but then again, I never really liked that feeling of déjà vu anyway, it was always a little bit unsettling.
