living on video
when the past meets the present
It is 3am and I am sitting in my darkened living room watching grainy videos of my children as babies. I found some old VHS tapes a couple of weeks ago and a friend was kind enough to digitize them for me. So here I am, in the middle of the night, crying, laughing, feeling incredibly sentimental.
I have hundreds and hundreds of pictures of my kids. But there is something about video that makes the lightning strike of nostalgia burn even brighter and stronger. Hearing their baby voices, seeing them learn how to crawl or swing a toddler golf club, watching the expressions on their faces change, all those little moments have come back to life. Suddenly it’s 1990 and I’m in my one-bedroom apartment where we’ve set up a baby corner in the living room. The corner threatens to swallow the entire apartment. There are a dozen “it’s a girl” greeting cards taped to the wall, and there’s the dresser with the changing table with diapers and wipes and powder standing by, and the family heirloom bassinet; the camera pans and nearly forgotten friends Jeff and Rona and Herbie all wave to me. My sister is holding Natalie and she lifts Natalie’s arm as if she’s also waving to me. I wave back from 2024.
I switch to the tape with the Star Wars birthday party we threw for both Natalie and DJ in 1997. I’m looking at all these people I used to know, people I used to call my friends. I marvel at how these children who are doing the limbo with Darth Vader are all now of an age to be married with children of their own. And then the camera pans again and there’s Grandma Millie, and Uncle Frankie, Grandpa Vito, Nanny, Uncle Robby, all of them gone from this world, but talking at me now through the miracle of film. The sound of my grandmother’s voice jars me; I haven’t heard it since 1998 and it takes me back to her always chastising me for not having a hat on the baby, half serious, half cajoling. I can hear her tsk tsk as try to sneak past her on the breezeway.
I watch myself hold my son, gently wiping the hair out of his face. I pick up my daughter and swing her around. She’s delighted, lets out a squeal. My heart clenches. Oh, the sound of her toddler laughter. It hits my right in that space where nostalgia meets sadness and I press pause on the video to gather myself. It freezes on an image of me talking to my aunt and I focus on how I look, with my 90s hair and an outfit more befitting my current age than my 30s. But that’s who I was back then, when being the perfect mother and wife were my only goals, before the divorce, before the breakdown. I try to reconcile my past self with my present self and I decide the person I’m looking at on the screen is someone else, someone I used to know but who doesn’t exist anymore. She seems nice.
After I’m done having an existential crisis, I click on the file just titled “Nat & DJ.” The VHS had no year on the label, so it’s a pleasant surprise when the image of Natalie and DJ playing in my parents’ backyard materializes. DJ is about two here, Natalie, five. My father is teaching DJ how to swing his Fisher Price golf club. There’s a net set up and a dozen or so balls on the ground and DJ is swinging at everything but the golf balls. I start crying when I hear his baby laughter, a sound that rings with unencumbered joy. It’s too much and I want to turn it off because I feel like I’m being visited by the ghost of childhoods past. I miss those kids. I love who my children have become, but I yearn for their innocence, for their lives existing without the smudged fingerprints of heartache, loss, or failures or a world that is failing them. I look at my kids on the film and I know and love what and who they have become, but I also mourn what and who they were without the difficulties of being a grown human being getting in the way of a joyful life.
I’m happy I had the tapes digitized. I might not ever look at them again, but it keeps my heart warm to know that they are there, that these versions of my children - these worry free kids - still exist in some form.