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Every day I get an email from One Drive offering to show me photographic memories from this day over the last few years. I must only have been loading pictures up on this particular medium since 2017, but that's still a big span of my life and a very big span for my kids' lives (all of Ernie's).
Mostly I don't remember much about the pictures - things have been so hectic and sleep so irregular that my brain has not held on to memories the way it once did, so a lot of the time they are almost new to me, sometimes reminders of a vague lost memory.
Today I got a video from the 27th April 2017 (or at least that's when it arrived on my phone - Catie took the video so it might be from the day before (
here's what I was up to on that date).This is a video of Phoebe and me and we're cued in my Catie which suggests I knew this was going to be a bit or I was trying to recreate something that had just happened. The video could not sum up my relationship with my super cool daughter more.
In my dressing gown, while Phoebe eats some foods, I puppyishly ask "Who wants to be a stand up comedian - hands up?" Phoebe looks at the camera with Tim from the Office disdain. I then ask "Who's funny? Hands up!" and Phoebe more or less ignores me as I reach for the sky, but raises both eyebrows with perfect timing.
She's just over two at this point and she totally has my number. It's a lovely little window into the past, the present and the future. She proves that she's effortlessly funnier than her stupid dad, even if I am willingly playing the stooge here.
Non-verbal reactions can trump the verbal.
How lovely and upsetting it is to get these glimpses of a largely forgotten past. How hard and easy it is to believe that that little girl is now 11 going on 15. How happy and sad it makes me feel to see that little girl who is both gone and still entirely here. How lucky and cursed we are to be the first generations of humans who can recapture fragments of the past.
Mainly though, how proud am I that my daughter was (and is) such a comedy genius.
Rita keeps improving and it's hard to believe we only get one more shot at this. Just when we really know what we're doing. The emotion was a bit delayed today, but came back to me after a few dry eyed performances.
