What Kids Actually Remember

We spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to give children things they'll remember.

We plan the vacation. Buy the tickets. Wrap the presents. Make the reservation. Take the pictures. Stay up too late putting something together on Christmas Eve because apparently whoever wrote “some assembly required” has a twisted understanding of the word some.

And there's nothing wrong with any of that.

In fact, we're big believers in it.

Take the trip. Buy the ridiculous present. Get the good seats. Make Christmas special. Start the tradition. Do the thing that makes the other adults wonder whether perhaps you've gotten a little carried away.

Sometimes those things become exactly what we hoped they would become.

But sometimes they don't.

Because here's the frustrating—and wonderful—thing about making memories with children:

We don't get to decide which moments become the memories.

There Wasn't Enough Room at the Inn

Years ago, Jeff and I were home for Christmas with his family.

His parents—Momo and Popo, as our nephew Keenan calls them—were still living in the old house then. It was a tiny three-bedroom house that worked perfectly well most of the year and became an exercise in creative space management whenever everybody came home for Christmas.

Every bedroom was spoken for. Even the rollout couch was spoken for. Suitcases landed wherever there was room for them. People were sleeping wherever people could reasonably sleep—and apparently our definition of reasonably had become fairly generous.

There was, quite literally, not enough room at the inn.

So Keenan, Jeff and I did the obvious thing.

We made a pallet on the floor and slept under the kitchen table.

And that's really about as much thought as I remember us giving it.

There was no grand plan to make Christmas memorable. Nobody announced that this would be fun. We needed somewhere to sleep, there was an unused piece of floor beneath a perfectly serviceable piece of furniture, and the three of us apparently agreed that solved the problem.

I couldn't tell you what presents were under the tree that year.

I couldn't tell you what we ate for Christmas dinner, what everyone was wearing or what movie was playing.

But I remember the table.

So does Jeff.

And so does Keenan.

To this day, somebody can bring up the Christmas we slept under the kitchen table and we're laughing before the story is even finished.

Nobody planned that memory.

Nobody spent money on it. Nobody made a reservation. Nobody searched Pinterest for “magical Christmas sleeping arrangements for your nephew.”

We just ran out of room.

And somehow, all these years later, that survived.

Memory Has Terrible Respect for a Budget

That's the part I keep coming back to.

Because there's a tempting lesson hiding in a story like this: children don't need expensive presents or elaborate vacations. Forget the big production. All they really need is your time.

I don't think that's quite right.

There is something wonderful about deliberately creating an experience for a child. Planning the trip because you know what they love. Hunting down the tickets. Finding the present they've been talking about for months. Driving three hours to see something that fascinates them even though, if we're being completely honest, you could have happily gone the rest of your life without learning quite so much about dinosaurs.

That effort says something, too.

What matters to you matters enough for me to enter your world.

Sometimes the thing we carefully plan becomes exactly the memory we hoped we were creating. The trip really is magical. The concert becomes legendary. The ridiculous present is still being talked about twenty years later.

And sometimes, somewhere in the middle of the carefully planned experience, something completely unplanned steals the show.

The flight gets cancelled and everybody ends up playing cards on the airport floor. It rains the entire day you were supposed to spend outside. Someone gets the giggles at precisely the wrong moment. The restaurant you spent weeks choosing is forgotten, but everybody still remembers the terrible diner you found when nothing else was open.

That's what makes memory so wonderfully unpredictable.

The expensive experiences aren't less meaningful because they cost money, and the ordinary ones aren't more meaningful simply because they didn't.

Memory has terrible respect for a budget.

It doesn't know what the tickets cost or how long you planned the vacation. It doesn't know which present was supposed to be the big one that year. It doesn't distinguish between the moment you spent six months arranging and the one that happened because there weren't enough beds.

It keeps what mattered.

And perhaps the only clue we get about what mattered is that, very often, when people tell these stories years later, the memory isn't really about the place or the present or even the kitchen table.

It's about the people who were there.

Maybe that's why the kitchen table survived.

It wasn't really a memory about where we slept. It was a memory about being together.

And all these years later, it still makes the three of us laugh.

The Childhood Happening in Between

There are moments we recognize as important while they're happening.

First days of school. Birthdays. Graduations. Holidays. The first time a child sees the ocean or walks into a ballpark or hears a favorite song performed live.

We know to pay attention to those moments. We take pictures because we understand we're witnessing something we'll want to remember.

But childhood doesn't confine itself to special occasions.

It keeps happening in the car on the way there. Around the kitchen table afterward. On Saturday afternoons when nobody has anything planned. During the extra hour somebody gets to stay awake because the adults are still talking and nobody has the heart to send them to bed.

Those moments don't announce themselves.

There isn't a little bell that rings and says:

Pay attention. They're going to remember this one.

And perhaps that's why we can be so surprised years later when an adult tells us what they remember about being a kid.

Sometimes it's the thing we worked incredibly hard to make happen. Sometimes it's something we barely remember happening at all. A child can carry a moment for years without the adults who were there ever realizing it mattered.

There's something humbling about that.

We spend so much of childhood believing we're the ones creating the memories. We plan things, provide things, take them places and introduce them to pieces of the world we hope they'll love.

And we should.

But they're doing something at the same time.

They're deciding what it felt like to be there.

They're noticing who laughed with them, who listened, who made room, who turned the inconvenience into an adventure, who was willing to crawl onto the floor when there weren't enough beds.

Years later, the details may fade while that feeling remains.

We Find Out Later

Maybe that's the bargain adults make with childhood.

We get to create the opportunities, but we don't get to choose what lasts.

So we keep doing both. We make the plans and leave room for what happens when the plans go sideways. We create the big experiences and remain present for the ordinary ones. We give children things to look forward to while understanding that Tuesday afternoon may somehow become just as important as Christmas morning.

And then we wait.

Because sometimes you don't discover that you've become part of someone's childhood until that childhood is long over.

One day the kid is grown, and you're sitting together somewhere completely different. Somebody begins a story with, “Do you remember when...?”

And suddenly you do.

Maybe it's the vacation you planned for months. Maybe it's the concert. Maybe it's the ridiculous present.

Or maybe three people who haven't fit underneath a kitchen table in a very long time start laughing about the Christmas when they did.

That's when you realize the memory was never entirely yours to make.

You only got to be there for it.

And perhaps that's enough.

Because we don't always know when we're making the memories kids will carry with them. We just keep giving them moments worth remembering—and keep showing up for all the ones in between.

Years later, if we're lucky, they tell us which ones they kept.

And sometimes, wonderfully, they kept the same ones we did.

Turns out, there was room at the inn after all.