Lament For What is Unremembered

There they sat on the shelf of my local international food store: Nutro wafer cookies. My lungs stopped working for a moment, and it felt like one of those movie montages where the actor is suddenly flooded with a million memories. 

Lest you think these cookies are something amazing, they’re not. Imported from the United Arab Emirates and dirt cheap, they taste right around the decent level. But since most store-bought cookies in Tanzania were absurdly expensive or styrofoam-tasting, Nutros were often the best option. They showed up at every birthday party, every school Christmas feast, and in many a school lunch. 

I brought home the package of cookies, set it on the table, and watched my kids’ responses. The sharp inhale, the sudden memories of a long-ago life – they felt it too.

Leaving Tanzania brought us many losses, and we have not missed these cookies. But what is missing are the reminders of their childhoods. Like Nutro wafers. 

I recently chanced upon a digital photo album that instantly made me homesick. The pictures were nothing fancy, everything ordinary: Grace, Josiah, and Lily in Tanzania, playing soccer in our yard with Gil – a weekly, sometimes daily occurrence. The kids would pull on shin guards and cleats and run outside to our mostly un-landscaped, gigantic yard. Gil would set up goals under the eucalyptus tree, and the four of them would hoot and holler (and let’s be real, sometimes scream and cry) while the sky turned their profiles golden. A kingfisher, stray chicken, or a hedgehog might interrupt and necessitate investigation. They would play until I called them in for dinner or until the mosquitoes started biting, a little dirtier, a lot sweatier. 

Perhaps everyone is nostalgic for childhood – their own or their children’s. But what makes me most sad is that my children now have no reminders of it. 

In Tanzania, the air was heavy on their skin and smelled of burning trash, sea salt, curries, or onions. They played to the soundtrack of buzzsaws and roosters and mosques. They ate Nutro cookies, frozen Azam mango juice, and rice and beans (so much rice and beans!). They fell asleep under mosquito nets on foam mattresses to the music of rain on the roof or frogs croaking outside their windows.  And if they woke in the night, they would be lulled back to sleep by the haunting cry of the Water Thick-Knee birds. 

My three big kids eased their way out of childhood while we still lived in Tanzania, so those reminders were everywhere. We would drive past the MerryBrowns restaurant where they used to play on the playground; former teachers from elementary school grabbed them for quick hugs; they still sheepishly asked the snack bar for a frozen Azam juice box with the top cut off. Their past intermingled with their present. 

But we yanked them from that world and dropped them in California, where the air is weightless. Their teachers didn’t know them, and their classmates grew up with McDonalds and Otter Pops instead of MerryBrowns and Azam juices, macaroni and cheese instead of beans and rice. It is just one more thing that separates them from their peers. More poignantly, it alienates them from their past and disconnects the past from their present. They don’t have the words yet to articulate this fully, but as I watch them struggle to figure out who they are and where they belong, I lament that they are so severed from their past. 

I second-guess myself and wonder if we should have relocated them when they were younger. But then I look at Johnny, who moved here at age eight and has spent the last four years zooming around our suburban HOA on his scooter and playing in the street with the neighborhood kids. I feel a pang for all he’s missed out on that his older siblings experienced.

We don’t get to live two lives at once, nor do we get to look ahead in the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book to determine what outcome we like best before making decisions. I wouldn’t have wanted my children to miss the extraordinary childhood they experienced, nor can I look back and determine that we should have avoided changing continents when we did. I must remember that the best stories are often full of plot twists, dead ends, and contradictions, yet in the end, the best authors always bring all the threads together. And I trust their Author.