Laughter and forgetting

I love climbing mountains.  There is nothing like standing atop the world at 21,000 feet on some peak in the Andes, with crags everywhere around you, the air so thin and cold it hurts to breathe, and the sense of wonderful exhaustion in your legs.  Even so, I have to confess that at base camp after every major climb I have ever done (or more accurately, on which I have succeeded), I have told myself, "I will never, ever do that again."  The pain and suffering are just too close, and I can't imagine that I would voluntarily do it again.

 But two weeks later, I can think of nothing better than getting back in the mountains, testing my limits of suffering once again.  Forgetting comes quickly.

I recently talked with some parents who think that the same thing happens with second children.  A baby elates us, tests us, makes us laugh... and makes us suffer like little else.  There is no summit to the mountain of childrearing, but the relationship of suffering to joy is pretty similar: they get all mixed up.  And as that first year of life gets farther and farther away, we begin to forget the suffering, the sleepless nights, the anger at a baby's incomprehensible cries...  There is probably a socio-biologist somewhere proving the hypothesis that forgetting the pain of a baby's first year is an evolutionary adaptation to guarantee the continuity of the species.  After all, if we remember well, who would have more than one kid?

What, though, are the consequences of this evolutionary adaptation to forgetting?  Might our nostalgia for the 1950s (or today, for the Reagan 1980s) not be something similar?  We remember the joys of our life with a baby, but we learn to forget the misery.  We remember the hope of "Morning in America" but forget dozens of unwarranted invasions of other countries, the ballooning deficit that began in the Reagan administration, the politics of division...  And we forget the racism of the fifties, the repression of women, the rank superficiality. Forgetting makes us nostalgic, and nostalgia turns many people into Republicans.

There's something similar when we hear people talk about their teenagers.  "Oh, they were so great when they were little...", or "that first year is just the best, there no time like it."  There are wonders of the teenage years, joys that we never have with Helena.  Just as 2012 is a time unlike 1982, better in some ways and worse in others.  But with nostalgia blinding us to the past, we also become blind to the present.

So I'm working hard not to forget.  Remembering the good, but also the pain; the laughter, but also the many, many sleepless nights.  Maybe it'll keep me away from the dangers of cynicism when Helena is a teenager... and the horrors of Republicanism as well.