Accurate Memories and the Daycare I Worked at for 1/2 a Day

 In an audiobook I listened to about writing a memoir, there’s a whole chapter about the accuracy of our memories. We writers tend to freak out if we get something wrong.  We tend to think of Oprah telling some writer “I feel duped” when she found out his story was supposed to be a true one but wasn’t. In my case, I’m writing about working with children- I have to change names and scenarios around in order to keep confidentiality. In that case, I may or may not be able to say “based on a true story” but rather, “loosely based on a true story .”  What’s the right answer? I don’t know, but someone will help me figure it out someday. Marjane Satrapi, who wrote “Persepolis” describes it best in this interview. 

I have a second cousin, and her birthday is either July 6th or July 8th, 1977. My family always talks about how everyone wanted her birthday to be 7-7-77. But I can’t remember the exact details. Either she was born on July 6th, and it was right before midnight and she was born too fast; or she was born on July 8th and it was after midnight and she had taken too long to come out. I always remember people kind of chewing out her mom when I was growing up, saying either “if you had just kept her in longer” or “if you had just gotten her out faster”, then she would have had this magical birthday of 7-7-77. And her mom would always retort, talking about labor and how much she couldn’t help it (which I would too, because jeez). It was either one of those scenarios, but I don’t know which one. I asked my mom, but she doesn’t remember either. This is her great niece, and she has too many nieces and nephews to begin with to remember everyone’s birthday. 

Another thing about memory that bothered me is when my parents and I were moving from Chicago to Arizona in late May of 1993 when I was almost 15. I came home to a completely empty house on the last day of 9th grade and a U-haul in the driveway. My parents had been saying for over a year that we were going to move to Arizona, but I didn’t completely believe it. The people that bought our house originally didn't have the money for it, so this is part of the reason I really didn’t believe we were moving until I came home on the last day of school to an empty house. I remember asking my father about it and he said that he lowered the price a little bit for them and their grandparents gave them the rest of whatever they needed. We’d been having garage sales before that point, but it still wasn’t real to me. 

Then I remember spending the first night in Oklahoma City, and it was my mom’s birthday. Her birthday is May 30th. We had pizza and cake in that motel room, and that was my mom’s birthday party. Then that night, our dog Queenie started barking at about 3:30 am and my dad insisted we had to leave because Queenie was barking and he didn’t tell the motel we had a dog. I remember it being scary as we drove with the U-haul in the dark for a few hours. The more I thought about it and looked stuff up, the more I realize how impossible this memory was. It’s a 12 hour drive from Chicago to Oklahoma City, and we didn’t even leave until I got home from school. There was no way my dad drove all that way, had the “birthday party” and then insisted on leaving way before sunrise because the dog was barking. So Oklahoma City on my mom’s birthday with the dog barking actually must have been the second night on the road. I asked my mom, where did we stay the first night?  She didn’t remember, she said “probably somewhere in southern Illinois.”  Then she insisted that my memory of my dad needing to leave because Queenie was barking and the motel didn’t know we had a dog was a completely false memory. She said, “We only stayed at pet friendly motels on the road and always told them about Queenie.”  So then what is the truth?  Why do I remember it as the first night when it was obviously the second and why do I have this memory of the dog barking and my mom having a completely different experience?  Is it because she’s gaslighting me, because my dad lied to her and said they were pet friendly or do I really have a false memory?  

I don’t know. But as I mentioned in my previous post, I do have a spiral notebook that I jot things down in for the book I’m writing. In it, I recall job hunting when I was very new to Houston. It was either when I first moved here or it was after I started working at the inventory service and they slowed down and had little to no work for a while (I don’t remember!) But it was a Montessori daycare that I was hired to help out in the two year old room. They were extremely abusive, and I noticed it immediately!  I noticed that the daycare director was bringing the kids into the classroom instead of their parents. Obviously, I’d worked in two daycares before and parents always came to the room to drop off and pick up. I asked the two other caregivers who worked in the room about this, and they explained that the parents aren’t allowed in the room.  They must drop the kids off in the office and have the director escort them back. I said something like, “That’s weird!” And the other caregiver snapped back at me something like, “Well that’s how it’s done here!”  

At lunch time, it was awful. One of the toddlers wouldn’t eat. One of the other ladies that worked there actually started force feeding him, and as a result, he threw up. I rushed over to clean him up and the other lady told me not to clean him up and to just leave him alone or something. I don’t remember, I just remember her telling me not to clean him up. Then she told me to go on my lunch break. I had 30 minutes. I walked outside and paced for 25 minutes, all up and down the sidewalk from corner to corner. Then I came back and told the director that I was not coming back. She actually told me, “Why?  You think we are abusing the kids?”  I was shocked because I didn’t accuse her out loud. She could just tell that that’s what I was thinking? Or had she known by my demeanor that I would think that?  I simply told her “Well you said it, I didn’t!” And walked outside the door while she insulted me. 

I went home and just shook and cried. I called my mom (who at the time lived a thousand miles away in Arizona still) and told her the whole story. She calmed me down and said not to worry, that “jobs are a dime a dozen” (NOT what they’d taught me in high school lol, in high school they always taught that you better keep a job no matter what because there aren’t any other ones.) Then my mom told me that she wanted to call my aunt for a second. My aunt who is my dad’s brother’s wife was a retired teacher. About 30 minutes later, my mom called me back and said my aunt told her I needed to call CPS immediately. I already knew that I did. I was just too shaken up. I was shaking so bad that it was almost like I was seizing. I told my mom that yes I knew I had to call. She said “Your aunt said you need to call right now.  Pull yourself together and call right now.”  

So I did. It wasn’t reportable to CPS, I had to contact childcare licensing. I was on the phone for hours. When I finally got through, they asked me a lot of questions. They took my name and number, but agreed to keep it as an anonymous report. I thought that they would storm in the following day, but it was actually a whole month later that I got a follow up call from the investigator that was going to go check it out. She proceeded to ask me the same exact questions that were asked the month prior by the intake operator. But by then, I had forgotten the child’s name. I had forgotten a couple other details due to the passage of time. I don’t know if this place is still in business. When I google the name, a few locations come up that aren’t the location I worked at for half a day. I don’t remember the address, but I do remember that it was right by downtown, so close to downtown that I could see the skyline pretty huge in front of me as I paced during my “lunch break.” If I knew the address now, I would drive by, but the other locations listed are nowhere near downtown. 

Remembering this experience and writing about it has really given my body visceral reactions. I have insomnia because of it. I wonder if my memory of it is 100% accurate.  Does it need to be?  Do I need to remember this child (who’s now an adult) name or just that I tried to help an abused child? Should I have called the cops when I was pacing on my lunch break? I didn’t have a cell phone, but pay phones were more prominent back then, I could have found one. Maybe I should have started pulling that woman’s hair out of her head and dragged her ass to the ground when she made that two year old throw up. Believe me I wanted to!  My monkey brain went straight back to memories of girls I went to high school with pulling each others hair and falling to the ground. But I restrained myself. I was no vigilante back then, but maybe I needed to be and should have been. I was very new to Texas, and my only experience with CPS had been in Arizona  my assumptions that they would take care of it immediately and shut it all down were based on a different state.  I had not even lived in Texas a year at that point.  CPS (and childcare licensing which is part of CPS) here is a joke.

I’m slowly realizing all the shit I’ve been through on jobs. I have come to believe that anyone who’s worked in caregiving roles, caring for children and elderly, must have some amount of compassion fatigue or PTSD. I definitely do. I know I’ve said working with elderly was easier than working with kids, and on the daily it is. But elderly do something quite regularly that no kid I’ve ever worked with has ever done- die. That has taken its toll as well. I have lost count of how many have died that I’d cared for. I had several on hospice.  Don’t get me wrong, I love hospice, I think it’s wonderful, I wish my father had received it, but even the natural deaths from very old age have taken their toll on me. 

Writing is my therapy. I’m not going to another therapist ever again. I’m at a point where I would say they are all assholes, but I’m pretty big on the “not all of them are like that” trope. I know not all therapists are assholes, but I’m not going back to one myself.  

I just wish our memories were more reliable. I wish the same people could tell the same story the same way every time. Life isn’t so black and white.