When my daughter arrived home from Kindergarten on Friday, I checked her take home folder as I always do and in it was an interesting project for her to complete. The assignment for her weekend homework was to create a Memory Box Project.
According to the sheet, they are working on a Personal Narratives unit and each child was to make a memory box or bag filled with items such as pictures, objects, etc. about their past memories: A birthday card, a photograph of an event, whatever that is memory filled.
I thought about this project a lot because as a child, I had a lot of memories but when it comes to visually having items that hold memories, I can’t say I have many. We moved around a lot as a child. I don’t have any pictures of me in grade school. I don’t have any of my old yearbooks. I don’t have any stuffed animals or artifacts from my childhood. It is almost as if my childhood didn’t exist. It feels weird living in the present, thinking of the future, without having a shred of anything from my past.
I think that it why as a parent, I save almost everything my children have, because I want them to have something from their past.
It’s made me think long and hard about where I came from. What I stood for. If I don’t understand my past, how can I move forward?
Food for thought perhaps.
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