Baby Videos Are Hard

Lighting Up the Gap

Most evenings, there’s a small window between dinner and bedtime where things slow down just enough for us to sit together for a few minutes. It’s usually during that time that my 13-year-old daughter will ask to watch baby videos of herself. Sometimes it’s just one or two; sometimes we fall into it longer than we planned. And if she’s feeling generous, she’ll include a few of her brother, too. ;-)

The other night, she was specific about what she wanted. She asked to see videos of herself walking, which puts her right around a year old. That age has a way of catching in my chest before I even open my phone, because that’s where my memory starts to thin out.

There are videos from that time. I’m grateful for that, more than I can easily explain. My husband, Chad, did a steady job of capturing those moments in the years after the sexual assault, even when I wasn’t fully able to be mentally present. Because of that, there is a record of what those days looked like. There is proof that they happened.

But watching them is harder than I expected it to be, even now, more than twelve years later.

It’s not just that I don’t remember those moments clearly. It’s that I’m sitting next to my daughter, watching something that mattered enough to record, and I can’t access it from the inside. I’m watching myself the same way she is, as if it’s someone else entirely. I know it’s me. I can hear my voice, see my face, and watch the way I’m responding to her. I look present. I look normal. But that doesn’t line up with what I remember or with the pieces I don’t remember at all.

So I sit there holding my phone, watching a two-minute clip of my daughter taking unsteady steps across a living room I recognize, while also trying to stay present with the 13-year-old sitting next to me now. She’s pointing things out, laughing at herself, asking questions, and I’m answering her. I’m engaged. But there’s something else happening at the same time, just under the surface.

“I’m trying to reconcile the woman in the video with the version of me I actually remember being. I’m trying to understand why it feels so blurry when it should feel clear. And I can feel the anger rising inside of me.”

Those moments were mine. They were supposed to be mine. And I don’t get to go back and have them ever again. That’s the part that still makes me angry. These videos don’t give me my moments back. He took those from me.

The videos don’t return anything to me. They don’t restore the memory or let me step back inside those moments. They just light up the gap. They make it impossible to ignore how much of that time I can’t actually reach, how much of it exists without me being fully there to live it.

And that’s where the anger comes from. Not sharp and explosive, but constant, like something burning low and steady in the background. It’s the awareness that I was moving through those days carrying something I didn’t understand yet, something that took up space in my body whether I wanted it to or not, something that kept me just far enough removed from my own life that now I’m left trying to piece it together from the outside.

So the video splits into two. There’s the version everyone else can see, clear and continuous, and then there’s my version, which feels fractured, blurred, softened at the edges, just out of reach no matter how many times I press play.

At the same time, I’m sitting next to my daughter as she is now. Thirteen. Choosing to be here, choosing to revisit these moments, choosing to share them with me again. And on rare occasions, cuddle up with me and share a blanket while we watch. I can feel how quickly even this season is moving. The difference is that for me, there’s a stretch of time that already feels like it slipped without my permission.

So I’m holding both at once: The weight of what I don’t remember, and the awareness of what I still have right in front of me.

Sometimes that just looks like sitting through a two-minute video that feels like it lasts a lot longer, answering her questions, and quietly working through everything else underneath it. There isn’t a clean resolution to it. But I am there now. More aware than I used to be. More able to stay present than I could have before.