A Memory--Retrieved or Fabricated

Jonathan Gottshall in The Story-Telling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human warns, “Be skeptical of…your own blog posts...” The past does not exist, he says, but we make sense of our lives and give them purpose by drawing from various parts of the brain to construct sustaining fictions.

I remember that the mother of a childhood friend of mine kept a calendar in her kitchen on which she marked off certain days.  Years later it occurred to me that the calendar was a birth control guide.  When I mentioned this recently to my friend, she was astonished and remembered no such calendar.  My friend’s mother was a gifted and devoted mother, but, possibly, she would not have chosen to have six babies.  Rhythm, on the other hand, may be the reason she didn’t have ten.  In that time before Our Bodies Ourselves and the like, women didn’t talk so openly with each other about birth control.  My own mother, I tend to think, would keep a rhythm calendar—if she kept one at all—in a drawer in her bedroom and reveal it to no one.  I feel grateful and privileged that my friend’s mother collected personal data so openly—if indeed that’s what she was doing and the calendar really did exist and my memory isn’t playing tricks on me.

Today, thanks to such blogs as Koala Bear and Christian Mommy, a range of personal, on-going stories concerning birth control are readily available.  That doesn't excuse me, however, from doing more field work in unearthing stories from women of all ages.  So many are willing to share if only someone asks.