Home movies

The home movies were dusted off and dragged out last night, ostensibly to show my five-year-old nephew his mom when she was a baby. Predictably, the nephew had about a 30-second interest in it before he went back to putting action figures on the dog, but the rest of of us (also predictably) watched them as though we'd never seen them before.

It's amazing enough to see my twin sister and me as little babies, watching us learn to walk or spit up applesauce when I know what happens to us in the next 34 years. There's that little boy with the curly blonde hair and the huge ears, and I knew what a difficult kid he'd grow up into, the places that he liked and the places he didn't, his failures with girls, the times he was picked on in junior high, the college he goes to, the bands he was amazed by...everything. I've never had a huge tragedy in my life, but it was almost tragic watching that. I wanted so desperately to go back there and be that kid's guardian angel and steer him right where I knew he went forehead-smacking wrong so many times.

But what was even more amazing was seeing my parents in those videos. I've said it before a million times that one of the biggest moments in anyone's life is when you realize your parents are actually people, with disappointments and dreams and, most of all, people who know very little about raising kids when they have kids, and have to make it up as they go along. There was my mom as a pretty twenty-five year-old (twenty-five!!!) in her seventies dresses, living halfway around the world from her hometown, living in a house that was literally "across the street from the jungle", and with twin babies crawling around seemingly coordinating near-miss accidents.

It was very surreal to watch, seeing my own mother—the woman who's done so much for me, made me breakfast so many times in my life—as a person that I might know now, and she'd be one of the many women I know who are either pregnant or just had babies, and all those babies are going to grow up and one day see pictures of their moms and, strangely, be able to imagine what kind of person she was back then.