Take my daughter for example. I spent ten years listening to the trauma she endured when I missed her Chanukah play in second grade. She does not remember how I rearranged my whole life practically to take my first ever vacation to Eretz Yisroel since I am married so that my flight would leave only the afternoon after her play. She does not remember how her Chanukah play was cancelled because of a random snowstorm. She does not remember how I frantically tried to reason with her teacher to please reschedule the play after Chanukah so I would be able to attend. She does not even remember how I galvanized my entire family to attend her play instead of me, so that most of the seats were occupied by both sides of my family who could not believe they were spending a morning in Bais Yaakov Elementary School watching my daughter be the best latke she could ever be. She doesn't even remember how I attended every single one of her performances from that day on, from dreidel to latke to hamantesh to head of every single dance that was ever created.

No, for ten years she only remembers to remind me that her mother—her very own mother!— did not show up for her all-star Chanukah play.

She finally let it go when she entered high school and dived into heading more dances than I had ever thought a latke could manage.

And then just recently, I remind my now-married daughter how I missed her second grade Chanukah play, and she says, “Really?” totally oblivious to her memory of that fateful cancellation.

I try to bring up details. The snowstorm. My sisters carrying balloons to fill the entire classroom. She shakes her head. Nope. No memory whatsoever.

Strange, no?

Memory is a funny thing.

And it became a not-so-funny thing at all when the topic of memory, lost memory, and memory retrieval exploded within the context of a court case when children accused their caregivers at a playgroup of abusing them and nobody could sort out the truth of their accusations. Nobody could sort out the accuracy, the veracity of their memories.

Lives were destroyed in the process and there were no answers to heal.

Memory is not simply an image that is recorded in a file in the brain, stored in one place for easy access.

Memory involves encoding, the process by which memory is created. Not like the telephone number you remember for a second and it disappears into outer space—the same place where Then there is consolidation in which the memory is constructed for storage. You know. You can't simply stick the Pesach dishes away. You have to wrap the stuff well for storage. So too memory. It needs to be constructed to withstand storage. And then there is retrieval. The system by which the brain is stored in a way it can be brought back online for viewing.

Like a spiderweb has interconnecting strands, so too is memory recorded like a spiderweb spreading out throughout the different parts of the brain.

Why is that? Because there are two aspects to memory. Explict memory is the memory we have readily available. It is organized through language. A recipe. Implicit is the memory that is recorded without language. Through the senses, like smell, touch, and taste. Through emotions. Through our perceptions of space and our relation to space. It's how we learn to ride a bike, for example. Second nature. Try teaching someone how to ride a bike by explaining it through language. No. You feel it and so can do it. And sometimes, a recipe is first explicit and then becomes second nature. Without thinking your hand reaches for the ingredients and the recipe happens almost by itself. Which works well if you are talking on the phone.

And explicit and implicit memory is stored in different brain structures. And memories are edited and stored and some details altogether not recorded to begin with.

We don't know what happens to memories that become forgotten. Some theorists say they actually disintegrate over time; others hold that the memory trace remains as long as we live, only the cues, the triggers to the memory become broken and that denies us access to the memory. In the same way that the picture of my son in a yellow traffic light pajamas exists but I have no way to find it in my house.

Why does this all matter?

Because it drives us crazy when we can't remember. And sometimes, it drives us even crazier when we do.

It matters because we can better understand how it is possible for a child to be angelic in school, a friendly, model student and then she hits bas mitzvah age, and she drops off Planet Earth with behavior that shocks her parents. And ten years later, after billions of dollars of therapy that seemed to have been flushed directly down the sewer, she announces she remembers some terrible trauma of which nobody had any inkling until then.

And everybody scoffs.

“She needed an excuse, so she blames her teacher.”

“He is such a loser that he has to make up stories about his older brother.”

But trauma is such that it completely messes around with memory. With the encoding, consolidation and retrieval process. That it is forgotten, buried, but not destroyed. And sometimes it is remembered again.

We are still limited in our knowledge of how precisely memory is stored and how it is retrieved. But there is enough research supporting the effects of trauma on repressing memory, how it is encoded randomly, often without language, with the sensory aspects of the trauma (the smell of the fire, the taste of the salt water in the mouth, a red sweater worn by the bully) and of how random triggers can activate a brain structure so that implicit memory becomes explicit, finally giving it the language it needs to organize itself in a manner that the trauma can be addressed and functionality can return.

There is a raging controversy about recovered memories in adults who claim to remember incidents of which there was no recollection for over forty years.

There is research to support this phenomenon.

Yes, it is possible to plant false memories into a child. Research has shown that too. But it is impossible to plant the memory along with the body sensations, with the emotional and physcial upheaval that occurs when trauma is encoded implicitly and the body carries on with the information of which the thinking person is oblivious. The acting out behaviors. The emotional dysregulation. The depression. The anxiety. The impaired relationships and unexplained visceral reactions to random things like a red sweater, the taste of salt water, the smell of fire at Havdalah.

All memory, continuous memory (which is how we refer to our present state of remembering our hours, our days, and life) included, is fallible. But that does not mean what is remembered did not happen. We even know that if two witnesses report exactly the same account of an event, they are not honest witnesses because the reality of memory is that it is infallible, it is subjective, it is malleable. But the core story is true.

So my daughter, who spent ten years remembering her mother's failure to attend her Chanukah play, has absolute no memory of my trespasses today. Does it mean it never happened? I know it did (although it would be nice to deny it!). And maybe, one day, when she will be scheduled to attend her daughter's Purim play, and a freak snowstorm happens, that will trigger total recall of being stuffed into her latke costume missing her mother in second grade.

 Note: this was originally published in Binah Magazine

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