What If the Point Isn’t to Remember It All?

Because making something is sometimes the only way to say: I’m still here.

May 27, 2025

It’s been a season of learning and growing and making. In the moments I have when I’m not playing with my son, and sometimes even when I am, I find myself making things, wanting to do something with my hands. Making bread, making memories, making a garden, making a love, a life, everything. I flour countertops and mix dough when I first wake up and meditate to the stretching and folding of the wild yeast. I stuff wet black soil into pots with my son’s yellow plastic shovel to bring a sense of play to this work of making things. He watches me but doesn’t put his hands in the dirt like I do. He draws orange circles on the back porch with chalk. The circles double back on each other and then trail off like shooting stars. We eat strawberries until our mouths turn sugar-sweet and share orange popsicles in the sun, our hands sticky with the joy of being alive.

I make plans to go to Portugal and Amsterdam, but I haven’t booked airfare. Instead, I book another trip off the coast of Lake Michigan because I always seem to find my way back to the place that is more water than land, strewn with dune grass and Petoskey stones. I sit in my brother’s tiny living room, him rocking in our grandfather’s old chair, our kids stretching the space wide with their laughter, and I feel the past blooming in the present.

I make outlines for my novel in the rare moments I am alone and write scenes that keep me up at night, thinking about their internal darkness. I pen bad poems about love—what it is, but mostly, what it isn’t. I publish chapters from my memoir about growing up in a meth lab, a mother cycling in and out of prison, and the kind of love that wounds as much as it protects.

I make time for myself, for my body. I make time, I make space for my partner, to feel his hands on my hips—not in passing from one task to the next, but in the all-encompassing desire and lust we had for each other when we lived in a shitty apartment by the sea in Los Angeles. I make an appointment for acupuncture and don’t tell anyone when it’s over so I can sit in the sun unhurried getting words out of my head.

I dye my hair blonde again—the way it was when my son was born, when I first felt myself disappearing as I stepped through the portal of Mother. I thought about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and how I’ve never wanted to erase someone else from my memory, but I have wanted to erase myself. For most of my life, I’ve felt like an afterthought. Writing has given me a way to say I am here. I exist. And motherhood has made me believe it.

I track time by the way my son goes from calling me mama to mommy, by the dwindling brightness of my hair, by the way my grandmother’s mind is fading from dementia. A psychologist had to be called to her room because she was hysterical. She said the soldiers were coming to kill me. I asked, what soldiers? but she just kept crying. I wondered if she was remembering the war—seven years old, fleeing to France on foot from her home in Belgium to escape the Nazis who had taken over Brussels. Her grandfather had to carry her part of the way. He limped and staggered because his prostate had swelled up like a balloon for reasons no one knew. They walked for days until they came upon a barn somewhere in the country where they could rest. They were underground, in the cellar where they kept the chickens, when the bomb hit. There was one tiny window letting in a rectangle of light into the otherwise blackness, and the shards of glass shattered against my grandmother’s face. She could hear her grandfather screaming for her.

Rosemarie! Rosemarie!

They searched for each other in the dark. The Nazis arrived. One of them held my grandmother while another took the glass out of her face. She told me they were gentle. She told me they were nice.

Isn’t it weird how the things that can destroy us can sometimes be the very thing that makes us feel held?

My grandmother has already been erased without her even knowing, or maybe she does know and maybe that’s the scariest thing of all. You feel yourself fading but there’s nothing you can do about it. The memories are disappearing and there’s no way to hold onto them. I think about my son and all the memories I try to keep and log away in my mind, but I know I won’t remember them when I need to. I think about myself and how I am forever flickering and how it’s in the making things, in the writing, in the creation, where I can hold and be held by the brightness and say, I am here. I am here. I am here.

And maybe what matters isn’t remembering it all, but being present enough to shape it while it’s still in our hands.

AFTER/WORDS by Jessy Easton

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