“First we took the orange trail and then red and we came down the green,” my older son said from the backseat of the car. I stared at the phone in my hand, where I had pulled up a map of hiking trails. No, he couldn’t have remembered it that clearly. We hiked it two years ago. This is a kid who forgets things minutes after I say them. I looked again. He was right – that was exactly what we had done.

“Yeah, I think you’re right,” I said.

Memory makes things strange.

Our brains leave some moments as if they had just happened and others fuzzy, as if they had pieces missing. Some memories are as if they happened to someone else, but at the same time, ourselves, in such different circumstances that we can’t even imagine them now. Others are as if you’re experiencing them immediately, each time thinking about it the same as it was back then.

I remember my then-boyfriend, now-husband leaving my college campus to drive home, his kiss fresh on my lips, feeling gut-punched. Watching his car pull away, then walking slowly over the grass back to my dorm all alone. But now I hardly recall how I said goodbye to him yesterday morning as I brought my kids to school. Did I kiss him? Did I even say goodbye at all?

I remember my kids being born as a series of fuzzy, incoherent snapshots, pain and holding on to my husband’s hand and holding this tiny being and desperation that I wouldn’t be able to feed them. Then there’s just a few days after my older son’s birth. I remember my older son on his back, while I shook a squeaky bird toy over his head, trying to get him to react. He watched with that serious, intense look he often had as an infant. Later that day, I read his first book to him – Where the Wild Things Are. I always thought that memory was so clear. But now that I reach for details, it blurs with so many of those long days and nights of newborn life.

It’s the same when I try to think of any single time pushing my kids on the swings at the park. Was that my older son or my younger son? What park was that at again? How were my hands positioned? How high did they really go? It’s as if they’re one long flipbook, image after image, swing after swing, them growing older and older with each flip.

Then there are the memories that were the last of an occasion, ones we wish we had captured better and hang on to vague glimpses. I saw one as I scrubbed the bathtub this afternoon, the remnants of a dolphin’s body that I had drawn on the tub in bath crayons. My younger son asked me to draw it, knowing that dolphins are my favorite animal. I think it may have been the last bath he took before switching to showers weeks ago. I can’t bring myself to scrub the drawing off.

It’s impossible to store every memory, every moment, no matter what the “living with purpose” people say. Or no matter hard we may wish.

Instead, storing memories are like grasping at a waterfall, the liquid flowing past us. Trying to keep fall leaves from changing colors. The mind will do as it pleases, storing some things for safekeeping and discarding others.

These things are even more exaggerated in parenthood, where monotony shares a bed with rapid change. The days are long but the years are short and all that. Parenting warps your perception of time.

But perhaps this new perception is actually more truthful in the end. Because as messy as memory is, isn’t that just a reflection of life itself?

Note: This essay was inspired by Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, which was made into the movie Arrival. I highly recommend it. Even if you’ve seen the movie, the story is simply amazing.